


Before the Fall

by ExorcisingEmily



Series: Before the Fall Verse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Before the Fall Verse, Fallen Castiel, First Kiss, Gen, Godstiel: Cas as God, Implied Sexual Content, Implied Torture, M/M, Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-02
Packaged: 2017-11-23 08:22:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 41,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/620044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExorcisingEmily/pseuds/ExorcisingEmily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the last act of a wrathful god as a penitent Castiel plummets to earth after ripping out his Grace and the Purgatory souls, and crashes right into the lives of the Winchesters. While Cas struggles with his new humanity and Dean with the implications of his fall, the Winchester boys find themselves caught between the King of Hell and the newly proclaimed Regent of Heaven, as Castiel's war between Heaven and Hell takes a turn for the worst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Starts out a bit theologically and mythologically heavy. Bear with me, the post-fall chapters are far more plot and relationship based. Cas just has a great deal to think about on the long fall to earth.
> 
> Before the Fall begins a larger, ongoing series of full plot "episodes," but can be read and appreciated on its own.

_They say that life's a carousel_  
_Spinning fast, you've got to ride it well_  
_The world is full of Kings and Queens_  
_Who blind your eyes then steal your dreams_  
_It's Heaven and Hell, oh well._  
_And they'll tell you black is really white_  
_The moon is just the sun at night_  
_And when you walk in golden halls_  
_You get to keep the gold that falls_  
_It's Heaven and Hell_  
\- "Heaven and Hell" by Black Sabbath

At times it's difficult even for an infinite creature, a spirit of near divinity, to understand for himself what is myth and what is truth of Creation.

Humanity got much of it wrong, of course, while establishing early Judeo-Christian lore. The Third Book of Enoch was little more than fantasy and speculation, ascribing seven levels to a Heaven that was a protective bowl above a flat world, conveniently held up by 'celestial pillars.' It was the amusing and fanciful interpretation of a fledgling race, as they were seen in the greater scheme of things, to beings who watched them rise from the seas as fish with legs. Humanity attempted to understand the revelations given them and humorously misinterpreted Metatron's teachings and the patient explanations of Seraphs to the few who could understand.

Human concepts changed as scientific learning advanced, attempting to incorporate rational into spiritual and always failing, always falling short of the truth. It was the work of men attempting to quantify things that one simply had to take on faith.

Nevertheless, Castiel thinks as his hands claw at his blade, perhaps it would have benefited those ambitious religious scholars to know that his own descent from Heaven began somewhere in the Thermosphere, though plummeting towards the Earth below he couldn't say if his travels took him through the layers of the _shamayin_ , or if he'd passed Asgard or Olympus on his way.

He wonders if he has. Some small corner of his mind, too broken by doubt, too stained by disobedience to cling to the gravity of the situation and the immediacy, wonders if all the Heavens of the world take notice at the plummet, the corona of fire streaking down towards the earth. If his cry of pain disturbs Valhalla as it breaks into the choirs of his family. There are others who could explain it better, who could show him the complexities of the cosmos, but Castiel was never the scholar: he is a warrior.

An upjumped soldier, who thought he could play at being God.

That niggling piece of his self-conscious interjects coolly into his thoughts, telling him that this choice is foolish as he turns the blade in his hands, but he dismisses the notion. That same voice had led him astray in the past, and is responsible for this. No: this is just. He deserves every agonizing moment, corkscrewing down through the air like a wounded dove, pressure tearing at his spirit, fire creeping into the edges of his vision and agony burning through his mind. The sharp thrust of the sword into his own stomach.

There is a sense of madness to this that Castiel can't fail to concede as his bloodslick hands lose grip on the knife when he hits the Statosphere. This is suicidal, even for a rebellious spirit like himself. For angels who choose to Fall, like Anael, they fall as spirit in two halves, Grace and Soul. One ripped away and discarded, one guided by will into a new life, a simple spark. For those like Lucifer, cast bodily from Heaven, they too fall through the metaphysical to the depths below. Castiel knows this: he has experienced it, though his vessel was reformed around him just before he hit that fishing boat, by a God who for some reason sees fit to keep him alive. Castiel has proven himself a far more brutal deity. . . he sees no reason why his judgment for himself should be any more gentle than what he meted out to others.

There's another reason for it, though. One that as he presses his hand over the wound, eyes stinging with tears, voice raw, he loathes himself just a bit more for admitting. Even as he draws the glowing warmth of his Grace forth, ripping and tearing at his very being, part of him is reaching out shamefully, searching. This isn't penitence, he thinks as he exerts his will once more, anchoring himself covetously on a familiar resonance below.

This is base selfishness.

As he enters the Troposphere, Castiel prays quietly to a Father he has no right addressing, closes his eyes to the spiraling stars above, and gives up the last of himself as-he-was in a desperate man's final play. Wings unfurl, slowing the very last of his descent, their form searing away as the last Grace, held on for this purpose, leaves him. He can feel the phantom snap of bone, the tear of muscle, the agonizing heat as his wings begin to sear around him. As the ground rises up to swallow him and consciousness flees, Castiel knows that he's Fallen from Grace in every possible way.

 

 

* * *

 

The sharp screech of interference in a nightmarish desecration of Led Zepplin's wafting guitar riff is the only warning before a wave of force smashes into the Impala. Spiderweb cracks crawl across the windshield and tires skid on the abandoned blacktop back road. The chorus of sharp curses from both brothers rings out at once: Dean for the damage to his baby, and Sam for the pain running through both kneecaps as he draws too-long legs back from where they smashed into the glove compartment, accidentally loosing the catch and sending false identities and spare cell phones scattering across the interior.

Hearts pounding, Sam with his hands braced against the dash, Dean white-knuckled on the wheel as he deftly steers them to a halt on the shoulder of the road, the Winchesters exchange looks of alarm before Dean gives voice to their identical thoughts with his usual eloquence.

"What the fuck was that?"

Wiser men would hesitate before throwing themselves out into the wilderness in the dark, following the red glint of fire and dark stain of smoke across the moon and stars, but Dean and Sam act in tandem: there's no such thing as 'Hunter's Wisdom.' Both clamber out of the car in unspoken agreement, Dean hooking his gun out of his holster, and Sam offering him one of the flashlights now rolling around on the floorboards as he pulls his own pistol from beneath his denim jacket.

Cresting the steep rise to the side of the road, stepping over the single strands of barbed wire that act more as a symbol of private property than any true barrier to it, the brothers both lower their flashlights for a moment as they soak in the image below them in a fallow field.

Fire rises in dancing curls and eddies, tracing the outline of an area as dark as smoke in the pale grass, shaped in the perfect impression of extended shadow-black wings, scorched away if they ever really existed at all. Sprawled in the grass at the center is a body stained with soot and soil and bubbling blood that seems black in the moonlight and startlingly scarlet as their flashlights sweep over the figure again, reflecting on glassy blue eyes that stare unseeingly up at the sky above.

"Cas!" It's irrational, the immediate need to throw caution to the wind and close the distance, but Dean's never been rational when it comes to the very short list of people who are his family. They may have parted enemies, and Cas may have become terrifying as hell, but the immediate stab of panic has Dean sliding down the rocky slope, dropping the flashlight to free a hand out to brace himself for the descent, gun loose within the grip of his other hand as he takes a knee at Cas's side. Sam's fingers close on empty air rather than leather sleeve as he tries to make Dean hesitate, and it's with a warier step that Sam follows his brother, flashlight and weapon cutting left and right, and seeming to gravitate again and again back to the man sprawled at their feet as no other threat is identified.

Just the fledgling wrathful God who had once been a friend, then.

Blood clings to Dean's hand already, seeping between his fingers as he presses down on the open wound in Castiel's stomach to try and stem the bleeding, other hand reaching to check his pulse as he rumbles a nonsensical string of curses and abortive pleas that might be seen as prayers, cutting short at the first slow flutter of lashes, a dazed blink up at the night sky, and a hoarse word offered in a familiarly graveled voice.

"Pride."

"Holy shit. You're alive." Dean's been blaspheming his way through every theological figure he could find for years, now, and Cas has never been exempt. "What happened to you, what…?"

"Pride, Dean. . . it was pride." There's a faint furrow between Cas's brows and his eyes flit to Dean as if wondering what part of his statement was confusing, too agonized to bother trying to clarify farther. Sam warily drops to a crouch beside them and contributes the obvious answer to Dean's question as he draws his knife and begins to cut the smoking and bloody remnants of Castiel's jacket away, creating strips of cloth to pack the wound temporarily.

"He fell."

The furrow deepens slightly in Castiel's brow, and though he stares blankly at the sky again, blood bubbling on his lips with his breath, he gives the faint impression of a nod after a contemplative moment. "It was. . . uncomfortable."

It's that remark which strikes Dean and decides for him, as Castiel seems to take that confession and the sharp pain of exploration of his wound as invitation to lapse into unconsciousness. The flat comment, caught between incomprehensible levels of understatement and the deadpan that Cas never quite honed as a form of humor.

It's the first time in a while that Castiel has sounded like himself.


	2. Chapter 2

Castiel isn't under the delusion that he fully comprehends humanity. They're illogical, driven by emotions. . . inherently flawed creatures; he knows it, just as Lucifer before him. . .  but they're _beautiful,_ too. His Father's favorites for a reason, humankind is driven by passion and choice and is endlessly surprising. He might never understand them, maybe he isn't built to comprehend them fully, and yet he's come to know the best among of them.

_Next to Sam, you and Bobby are the closest things I have to family. You're like a brother to me, Cas._

Standing in a darkened room facing down a friend whose trust he had lost only hours earlier in a trap of holy fire, even pride and his lingering sense of righteousness can't soften the impact of those words coming from the one man he knows better than any of his Father's creatures. Perhaps better than Cas knows himself, at this point.

A _brother_. For Dean Winchester, this isn't a simple concept or a turn of phrase. Family is the purest form of affection Dean's ever experienced or granted, the dearest expression he has at his disposal. Brotherhood isn't the loose bond of a shared absent Father for this man—it's everything. He lives for his brother, died for him, sacrificed, suffered hell, and would do it again and again. A _brother_ . . . the only constant in an uncertain world, outlasting all other attachments, transcending all boundaries. Romantic encounters and affections are fleeting, to Dean, brotherhood is eternal and unbreakable. It's the purest form of _love_ that he knows.

_I thought you said we were like family._

Castiel knows Dean very well.

_Well, I think that too._

But he knows that Dean doesn't understand the significance of his own words reflected back at him.

In the end, it doesn't matter. At first, because Castiel convinces himself that he's doing what he must. And as the wind whistles past his ears, blood and spirit leaking from between his fingertips, it doesn't matter because he knows he doesn't deserve Dean's loyalty or his love.

Castiel began as a being of pure creation.

He becomes a monster of destruction.

He ruins everything he touches.

_And_

_then_

_he_

_falls._

His gasp is shallow, but the air in his lungs feels like fire. Tears sting his eyes as he wrenches them open in the darkened room, frantic and alone. No. Not entirely alone. The murmur of indistinct voices draws Cas back from his memories, his dreams, and gives him an anchor upon which to weigh his feverish mind. The dim light from the windows sluices between Enochian sigils and paints a hazy watercolor picture of his environment.

Bobby Singer's home. The realization allows him to focus on the low rumble of words from the dimly lit kitchen beyond.

"Yeah, I get that he came to you, Dean. The thing I'm _not_ understanding is why you two idjits decided to load him up and bring him here after everything. . ."

"After _everything_ , Bobby, how _couldn't_ we? Look, I know he went off the rails. I get that. Trust me, I get that. . ."

"Do you? He's _dangerous_ , Dean." Sam's accusation sinks in first, not just for the trust Castiel lost, but because it underscores the conflict he's brought here and the loyalty he cast away.

"Yeah, and we're not? You look at our track record over the last few years, Sam? None of us is exactly the picture of mental health and . . ."

"He _lied_ to us!"

". . . mental health and _honesty_. Or hell, of good choices."

"He opened Purgatory!"

"I started the Apocalypse! You. . . hell, you wandered around soulless . . ."

" _Also_ on him. . ."

". . .for a _year._ And fine, putting aside the soulless thing, okay, but the demon blood. . ."

"If I can interject." Castiel is panting at the exertion of standing and walking, but all three hunters turn towards him instantly, tense and coiled tightly as if expecting attack from a man who has to wedge himself against the door frame to stay upright. The sound of his approach was concealed under the noise of their argument, so he can understand some level of surprise, but in years now of unexpectedly appearing among them, announced by a whisper of wings if at all, he hasn't ever seen this look of alarm in their eyes at his appearance. "I didn't mean. . . it wasn't my intention to bring conflict here. I'll go."

He means it as a farewell, pushing off of the door frame unsteadily to move past them towards the back door, clutching the blood-soaked bandage at his side. It's surprisingly Sam that takes his arm and steers him to a seat at the kitchen table, almost gentle as he pushes Cas down into it rather than let him fall.

Even without trust, the Winchesters's instinct is to help their friends.

It hurts more than the injury to see the wary look in Sam's expressive eyes, to watch Dean tuck his hands beneath his elbows to keep himself from reaching out, and to see Bobby shift his hat back on his head to scrutinize Castiel more closely, as if he has to keep an eye on him for the sake of his boys.

This isn't a quiet sit-down. Now that he's mobile and conscious, this is far worse than that.

The term 'friendly interrogation' has always struck Castiel as a contradiction in terms. Maybe it's meant to be. He's never understood the entirety of the human sense of humor.

"Cas, what happened?" Dean's their voice, as if the looks they cast between themselves were silent communication, assignment of roles in this unfolding drama. Maybe Dean volunteered for it, and maybe it's a practical exploitation of the deeper connection they all know he once shared with the elder Winchester.

"I fell." Castiel can tell even before Dean even furrows his brow and finishes shifting into a more imposing posture that the answer is insufficient. Bracing his elbow on the scarred and battered kitchen table, Cas lifts his hand slightly, palm out, a quelling gesture that used to be so much more than a simple request. "I. . . _chose_ to fall. You were right. All of you, you were right about me."

There's a beat when they're likely communicating silently in looks and gestures Cas knows he'd misinterpret even if he were watching anything but the whorls of the woodgrain beneath his flattened palms, the blood crusted beneath his fingernails and along his cuticles. He thinks this is the fever. The blood loss. His eyes are strangely unfocused. He doesn't hear the running of the tap, but a glass tumbler shifts into his view, full of sweet-smelling water, and draws his attention back up. Dean's green eyes are level with his now, hard and unyielding, but he pushes the water closer still. "Drink that. You sound like shit."

He follows the order on instinct. The water is cold, a balm to a raw and strained throat, but he can taste the lingering undertones of the pressed and formed rose-petal beads he knows comprise Bobby's favorite rosary. Setting the emptied glass back down, he shifts his gaze to the older hunter, addressing him directly. "Holy water. I fell, but I didn't fall _that_ far."

"Had to check." Bobby's unperturbed by being caught, and after a moment Cas nods once in assent and understanding. The look Dean shoots Sam and Bobby is smug: he either assumed the outcome of the test, or had already doused Castiel while he slept. Either way, it's irrelevant and cast aside as Sam runs water from the tap into the glass, setting it in front of Castiel once again. Dean stays crouched beside the table, his elbows across his knees. "So you fell. Like Anna."

Cas nods again, but Dean is still going.

"So why aren't you being born some squalling blue-eyed kid in a hospital somewhere, man? It doesn't track."

Dean doesn't need knives and tools to interrogate: he knows best how to cut to the truth, and he gets right to the heart of the matter. Castiel wraps his hands around the tumbler again to still their shaking, weighing his response long enough that he can sense the impatience from the hunters around him. Finding the words, he meets Dean's gaze levelly, willing him to understand. "I didn't fall for the chance at a fresh start."

"So why did you?" Sam's leaning against the kitchen counter, arms folded and what Cas has heard Dean refer to as a 'bitch face' gracing his features. "I mean, last time we saw you, you were pretty gung-ho about being God. All guns blazing, raining judgment down on us all. Big change, going from that to this. . ." Sam _prayed_ to Castiel, and he ignored it. He only answered once it was Dean's angry words, his scorn, turning Sam into a bargaining chip. It's little wonder that Sam is as expressive as his brother tries not to be, distrust and betrayal narrowing his eyes and pressing his lips together in a line.

Swallowing, Castiel tries to still his mind for the response, but the shift he sees in Dean from the corner of his eyes draws his gaze back unintentionally from Sam. Castiel can see understanding slot into place in Dean's eyes, watches him relax his posture and unclench his hands. Of course. This. . . _this_ Dean of all people can understand.

Rising to his feet again, the elder Winchester fixes a forbidding look on his brother, his voice deep and rough as he often seems to become when putting his foot down, when pulling rank so to speak. "Doesn't matter right now. What matters is he made the choice, and he's Cas again, and he's bleeding out in here. We take care of our own."

Castiel's dizzy with relief, or perhaps he's simply dizzy. He doesn't remember being moved back to the couch, just the sting of hard liquor that burns his nostrils and sears his flesh poured into his wound, a traditional Hunter's antiseptic. Remembers two bitter pills, and then hours later, once the house is still and quiet, Dean's accusatory, growling voice and intense stare that catches him somewhere between sleeping and waking. "Dumbass. Is punishing yourself enough to get killed over?"

He remembers the look that passes over Dean's face at his response, though he can't easily describe it or the emotions behind it.

"I learned it from you."


	3. Chapter 3

_Dean, it’s **not broken**._

Flames lick the air between them, leaping and dancing and providing a crackling light that poignantly illustrates the divide between them. Holy fire or not, Dean can't help but think of the light as hellish: Castiel's eyes seem almost black in the shadows that settle in the hollows of his face, gaunt and determined and mad. Dean has seen the fires of hell before, seen it turn a good man on himself, on his fellows. He's been on the other side of that equation.

A blade seems to twist in his gut, seeing it happen to the one man . . . one being. . . from whom he expected better. Even in Zachariah's green room of Heaven there was some spark of hope that Cas would stand beside him. And he did: he turned on the family he was born to in order to help the family he chose. Team Free Will--two broken boys, an old drunk, and a fallen angel.

There's still loyalty in Cas's stare, in his panicked command for them to run from the black demon-smoke coming for them, but they all know the score. There's no need to free Castiel from the flames. . .

The demons are coming for the Winchesters, to free the angel in their corner.

Castiel chose power over family.

Everything falls apart from that one moment, fractures from a single crack.

This is Dean's nightmare, working its way into the flat stare of his little brother returned soulless from hell while his soul writhed in torture, spreading its roots through the images of the screaming souls twisting on the rack, and when he looks up from his work, razor in his hand dripping with blood and gore, it's Castiel's fire-lit face rather than Alastair's that he sees as the knife comes from the darkness.

_It’s too late now. I can’t turn back._

Dean wakes silently, without startling or crying out, too used to the visions by now to fight them. Sam's rasping snores from the other side of the room settle him, ground him in reality, and after a moment he swings his bare feet to the floor and closes the door behind him silently, careful not to wake his brother as he catches his duffle bag and his boots in hand.

Morning sunlight creeps through the house, filtered through windows too obscured with dust and grime and the dried blood of Enochian sigils to allow it to fill the space entirely. In the living room, he notices those windows first: fresh blood paints corrections into the shapes and spaces between, like an overzealous esoteric grammarian editor had gone to town on their wards. There are symbols he doesn't recognize following the same patterns, filling the spaces between. Face a mask of concentration, stubbled jaw set in stubborn lines, Cas stands in the light of the window with his left hand cupped and bleeding as he dips the fingers of his right into it like a paintbrush, a bloodied kitchen knife resting on the coffee table.

"Your grasp of Enochian is limited."

It's such an absurd greeting, considering the circumstances of the past few days, that Dean has to laugh, a short puff of wry amusement that's quickly stifled as he leans a shoulder against the doorway. "Yeah, well, we copied it directly from the books."

"Your books are wrong, then. And your handwriting is atrocious." He'd told them that there were flaws in their angel-proofing when he'd slipped the wards. Now the man whom they'd intended to keep out is the one building the barricades for them, and it seems wrong.

"Lucky for us we have a native-speaker here then." It's sarcasm but Cas misses it, offering a short nod in response as he finishes drawing his fingertips over the glass and settles heavily on the arm of the couch, as if taking the few steps to sit fully would be too much exertion. "We expecting angelic trouble?"

"Yes." It's jarring, watching Cas wrap the remnants of a blue tie around his hand, staunching blood flow like a normal human, stripped down to his ripped and bloodstained white dress shirt and trousers, blazer ruined for bandages when they found him and trench coat a blackened and tattered heap in the kitchen trash. "I can hear them. Like Anna. They're looking for me, and it will not take long for them to look here. I can ward against them, but I expect Crowley will come for me first. I’ve put all of you at risk by coming to you."

Castiel's guilt and remorse spark the first light of anger deep in Dean's gut, his failure to meet Dean’s eyes fans it. Patience breaking at last, Dean stalks into the room, closing the distance between them, fists clenched as he looms over Cas and forces the fallen angel to meet his gaze. "You want to tell me what's going on, now, Cas? And don't give me any of this 'I fell' crap, I want to know _why_. We deserve to know."

The deep breath Cas take seems to steel him, and he squares his shoulders as he resolves himself to the inevitability of this conversation. "I thought I was doing right, Dean. I thought I was keeping you and Sam safe from Raphael's plans to restart the Apocalypse." The flex of Dean's jaw is obvious, and he may be forcing himself to silence but the argument is all there in the lines of his face. "And maybe that was right and just. But I allowed a demon to interpret for my Father's will for me, and tempt me into power." The self-loathing is evident in his words, his face, his tones, and his gaze shifts away from Dean's, unable to meet his stare as he continues; another quiet confession he's offering to a man who he knows will accept his disobedience, if not his betrayal. "I was foolish, and stubborn, and blinded by fear and by pride. It was wrong. _I_ was wrong."

"No shit. Just worked that out, Sherlock?"

There's no humor in Castiel's eyes when he looks back at Dean. As flat as his words are, there's something raw to them as well; something distinctly human. "I'm sorry, Dean. For not listening. And I am sorry for endangering you all again. I didn't know where. . . I had no one else to turn to." He hates feeling helpless. Even before he'd played god, Castiel had been far from powerless. His few stints in humanity have him concerned that he is. . . as Dean said. . . just a baby in a trench coat. It grates, but he doesn't _deserve_ power.

Cas realizes he's fallen silent, that Dean's allowed for the long lapses in conversation that are distinctly Castiel's. "The civil war. . . _my_ war. . . it resulted in many deaths in Heaven. My brothers and sisters will be coming for me, now. Those who had supported Raphael will want me dead. Those who fought with me. . ." Castiel looks back at his hands, now, eyes slipping out of focus as he listens to something outside of the edge of normal hearing. ". . . They want me dead too. A new leader will rise, will make their own choices and claim it as divine will, and I will be a symbol of rebellion." There's a wry twist to Castiel's lips, that dry edge of bitter, self-deprecating humor that he's found in humanity. Unable to sit still any longer he pushes himself to his feet, edging around Dean to pace under the guise of checking his work. It keeps him from having to see Dean react to how far Castiel's fallen.

"I succeeded where Lucifer failed. I have decimated the forces of heaven and united the armies of Hell in common cause." It is a confession, all of it, laying his sins out clearly as part of his penance. Dean's silence lasts longer than he can handle, longer than he can stall. Bracing himself, Castiel turns to face him.

The right hook to his jaw still takes him by surprise.

Cas hits the ground hard, blinking up into Dean's righteous anger, hands flat on the floor making no move to defend himself. It proves unnecessary. Dean braces his fists on his knees as he hunkers down, forcing Cas to meet his eyes, voice a low roar. "You should have come to _me_ , Cas. To _me_. Crowley, Raphael, all of it, we'd handle it like we _always_ do. You don't turn on your _family_. We'd have watched your back, and if we went down we'd go down swinging and _without_ cutting any more deals with fucking _Crowley_."

Castiel can hear Sam coming, alerted by the sound of his brother's rage. He notes Bobby's arrival out of the corner of his eye, a shotgun loose in his grip, but Dean has him frozen in place, an electric stare that seems to fuse his bones together, locking his joints. It takes a moment to recognize the emotions playing through Dean's eyes, and by the time he does Dean is back on his feet. "I'm. . ."

"You come to _us_ , Cas. That's what family's for." Dean doesn't wait for the apology. Perhaps he thinks Castiel's already given it. Cas finds himself drawn up by a vice-like grip on his elbow and hauled into a one-armed hug. _This. . ._ this is what he gave up Heaven for. It hurts; the punch, even the embrace itself. It's no more than the affection the brothers share every time one survives a stupid choice, every time one returns from the impossible. . . but no _less_ , either.

Castiel has. . . _had_. . . hundreds of brothers and sisters. Thousands. His family spanned Heaven, and Hell as well if you wish to get technical. Every time he raises his blade in defense of the Winchesters he's making a choice. He's carving away at his family.

 _Like a brother_ , Dean had said, and what he meant was _love,_ of a depth and level of self-sacrifice and pain and even rage and fear and acceptance that angels were never meant to experience, that few humans ever grasped. Castiel accepts Dean's terminology for simplicity's sake alone.

This means more than 'family' ever could to him.

For that brief moment he lets himself hold on, fists bunching in worn flannel, eyes closed, and he's Cas again, the Winchesters’ Cas, Dean's Cas, once lost and now found. The feeling lingers even after the sharp clap to the shoulder, the only way to end a hug and maintain machismo if observations of Dean are to be accepted as the norm.

Bobby clears his throat, looking between the two of them and shaking his head, pulling his flask from the pocket of his jeans. "Well, ain't this just touching. I hate to be the one to break up the Hallmark moment, but now that His Holiness is back on his feet. . ." He touches the flask to the brim of his cap in sardonic salute, the gesture somehow lessening the potential sting of the words ". . . what're we gonna do with him? No offense, Cas, but is there anyone in this world you didn't homicidally piss off in the last few months? That's a world of hurt headed our way. . ."

"Ooh, I love a good entrance line."

Head canted to the side, hands tucked into the pockets of his overcoat, the King of Hell offers the room a genial smile before his eyes cut to Castiel, mockery thickening his accent and hatred narrowing his eyes.

"Hi, honey. I'm home."


	4. Chapter 4

"Well isn't this just. . . cozy."

Crowley's amusement at the scene before him is genuine enough, though it does little to hide the malice in the bared-teeth smile he flashes to Castiel. In the moment of surprise as Crowley's voice rang out, Dean's hand on Cas's elbow became a bruising pain, restraining and hauling him bodily back between the living-room wall and the very solid, protective shield of muscle and stubbornness posed by the elder Winchester, forcing any assault to deal with him and Ruby's blade before touching Cas.

Cas isn't quite prepared for the wave of annoyance that swells within him at being treated as helpless. He's annoyed at being shoved to relative safety, as if he's another civilian Dean has to protect. This is a human emotion, and irrational considering how injured he is. The sting of that self-same pride that brought him low, perhaps.

"Crowley."

"Ding ding ding. Right in one. And here I thought you'd be expecting me, darling." Turning his eyes to the ceiling, Crowley slips into the room in a sidestep, edging his way around the edge of the Devil's Trap above him, curling the carpet up with his foot to check beneath it before stepping on that as well. He negotiates the room with an air of distaste as the boys take his slow progress to edge the opposite direction, towards the door, Dean dragging Cas along with him.

The entire process amuses the King of Hell who stretches his arms out mockingly, taking a few shuffling steps and swaying his hips. "Ah. Care to dance, boys?"

"No." Castiel hisses in pain at the pressure of Dean pressed into his injured body to keep him in place, to negate the protective instinct that would have _him_ stepping forward. He is _their_ guardian. The inverse is _wrong_. He's meant to be at Dean's side, or between him and danger. Dean speaks over him, though, drawing attention to give Sam the time to move into place. "Sure, Crowley. Let's dance. I've been wanting to throw down with you for a while now. . ."

"Oh, the bravado, I love it. I almost see why you're so gone on him, Cas. Though I must say. . . obvious you're not after him for his brains. But he does have a certain cave-man charm to him." Behind Crowley Sam raises his gun and Bobby covertly flicks the pages of a book on the table, shotgun braced to his shoulder. With a put-upon sigh and without looking, Crowley flicks his wrist dismissively, sending the old hunter barreling forward, smashing into Sam. "Please, children. I wasn't born yesterday. Don't attempt subterfuge around me, it makes you look amateurish."

"Enough." Hands bracing against Dean's shoulders, Cas tries again to leverage the hunter aside. "It's me you want, Crowley, leave them out of this."

"Fuck that." Dean's growl is angry, and he's less than gentle in shouldering Castiel back against the wall again, ending the struggle for Castiel to step forward and end this with a sharp, warning glare. Behind him, where Sam is extracting himself and hauling Bobby back to his feet, Castiel hears an echo of the sentiment. Sam may never forgive him for hurting him to distract Dean, but he still won't let Castiel sacrifice himself.

"Oh, get a room already, you two. None of us wants to see your awkward fumbling. And you're missing the obvious, all of you." Crowley flutters his hands indicatively at his own his body, Vannah White to a show-piece prize. "King of Hell. If I wanted you dead, you'd be dead already. Now, ask me what I want." None of them speak up quickly enough, so with a sigh he mockingly adopts the gravel of Castiel as he points a finger at the fallen angel, filling in their 'parts' himself. "'What do you want, demon spawn.'" Pointing back at himself, he responds in his normal voice. "Your head on a pike." His finger swings to Dean unerringly, dropping a register in obvious mockery. "'Over my muscular dead body' insert impotent threats here." Back to himself. ". . . But not today." His finger swings to Sam and Bobby, "Insert incoherent macho grunting from Gigantor and a charming redneck colloquialism from the old man, and back to me."

No one else in the room seems amused by the display, and yet Crowley smiles wider.

"You're toying with us." Cas's eyes narrow, his nostrils flaring, head canting to the side as he attempts to figure out the game put before him. "You want me dead. You want _them_ dead. 'Denim wrapped nightmares,' you called them. And yet you want me to believe you'll let them walk away?"

Dean turns his head to raise a questioning eyebrow at Castiel, easing up on his protective stance enough to cast the infuriating smirk he's perfected over the years, amusement in his eyes. "Denim wrapped nightmares? What, he said that? I like that. Hey, Sam, we give Satan junior there nightmares!"

"You're goading him." Castiel interjects in an undertone, eyes narrowing consideringly.

". . . Well yeah. You _have_ met me, right?" The exchange goes unnoticed, as Crowley waves a hand dismissively.

"Oh, but how many more nightmares have _we_ given _you?_ No, Castiel, this hunt needs them; on your own like this, you're easy prey. For this plan to work, Rocky and Bullwinkle here need to keep you moving, keep the pressure on."

"Plan?" Sam may ask the question, but it’s Castiel that Crowley addresses, smirking at the fallen angel. He holds the power, now, and he wants the former ‘God’ to know it.

"Ah, yes. I'll cut to the chase, shall I? Our time's growing short. I don't want you dead. Well… not yet anyway, though the idea of peeling your skin off an inch at a time in front of your boyfriend and then slitting his throat does give me a certain level of satisfaction that I wish to explore at length. I'm here to help you, though. Consider it a return of the favor you did me, Cas."

"Favor?" It's Sam's question again, a continuation of the terse interrogation as the younger Winchester prods Crowley just to see how much information they can gather. His voice this time is suspicious and dangerous; he’s gathering information about Castiel as a potential threat as well. Cas flinches at hearing it, at seeing the ratcheting tension in Dean's shoulders and back. For his part, Cas simply watches Crowley, allowing the question to stand.

"Yes, moose, a favor. See, you're the best thing to happen to swell the rank and file since Nuremburg, angel. All those hypocrite pseudo-psychologist motivational speakers you smote, they'll be excellent at my old line of work. The racists, the hate-mongers, the murderers, all those judgmental souls. . . you were too busy healing the righteous and smiting the unclean and not paying attention to the fact that you were a sodding Godsend, pun intended, to hell. You sent us the bloody cream of the crop. Honestly, you'd be a decent talent scout for the down-below if you ever decided to take the plunge. Well. Not that the decision's yours anymore." Crowley's grin widens, and he makes a show of examining his nails. "You see, you went and made yourself human, complete with all the trimmings, or close enough. I can smell that soul you’ve hashed together, and you know what it smells like to me?

Meat. No matter which direction you go in the end, you're just meat. Me, looking at what you've done, what I can feel rolling off you, the company you keep. . . I _like_ our chances. No endless line for you, mate, we'll cook you up nice and proper. But first, I'm going to let you stew a bit. Let everyone catch the scent and hare after you. Keeps the angels busy, keeps them squabbling amongst themselves, and my people. . . well, I love that illusion of a common enemy to secure my power base. Particularly when he's bloody well neutered himself for me already."

Outside, wind howls, the first light in the room pops, glass shattering, and at it Crowley's grin widens. "And here they all are. I can't have you going to ground here again, be too obvious. . . so let's get this show rolling." Raising his fingers, Crowley snaps, and the wall behind him goes up in flames, creeping up the ceiling towards the Devil's Trap above, snaking across books on the shelves, catching the moth-eaten curtains.

Bobby surges forward, profanities spewing from his lips, and Crowley raises one finger at him. "Now now. Behave. I don't really need _you_. . ." The warning is enough for Sam, wrapping his arms around Bobby's ribs, hauling him back toward the door onto the junkyard.

"Now what was it you said to me, kitten? Ah. I remember. 'Flee or die,' boys. Flee or die."

With another snap of his fingers, Crowley disappears as the front door implodes inwards, black-eyed demons crowded into the doorway, a slow sneer painting the leader's features. "My my. Lookee what we have here."

The gunfire begins instantly, and as the first beams of the only real refuge the boys have had in years begin to rain down in embers and flames and smoke, as the protective sigils become moot with the shattering of the windows, the Winchesters flee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's more explanation of the changes from canon (. . . aside from the obvious "No Leviathan" bit, because I was never entirely sold on that plotline) coming up, along with more developments on the personal side of things. Bit dialogue-heavy here. I blame Crowley. Who I have now decided I love to write. That probably says nothing good about me.


	5. Chapter 5

The fires are rising, the exits blocked by demonic smoke and flashing lightning. Crowley's blaze spreads faster than any natural fire has the right to, and Castiel is unarmed. This is a fact that had never bothered Castiel before: even now, his first instinct is to lay hands upon the demons, to smite them, to call forth an angelic blade and defend the Winchesters from the army of Heaven. He needs to adjust his worldview. To assimilate.

It’s an interesting time to come to that realization, but adrenaline seems to be aiding him in that matter. He needs to think like a human, and so the question then naturally becomes: what would Dean Winchester do.

He has a very clear answer, considering Dean is fighting at his side. The demonblade slashes the air, held in a backhand grip as he retreats with a fighter's grace, keeping himself between Castiel and the demons coming forward, Sam and Bobby momentarily lost to the smoke. That leaves Castiel to watch the exit, to face off against the maelstrom of energy there as they move through the kitchen towards it, demon spawn and angels both waiting to join the fray. Among Bobby's neighbors, that malicious black cloud is choosing the bodies of innocents to throw at them, to harry them, perhaps to kill them.

Kitchen.

Stepping to the right, Castiel grabs a simple canister of table salt and a knife, but then finds himself crashing through the air, hitting the wall hard enough that he feels the charred wood of the door frame crack beneath him, the fire licking at his back and an answering pain from his stomach as the dental floss stitches tear. Dean answers the assault with a roar that seems muffled somehow, and Castiel hears the displaced energies of a dying demon, the blade striking home despite the creature's innocent shell.

Another nightmare that the elder Winchester will acquire on his behalf, doubtless.

As Sam emerges to half lift him back to his feet, Castiel begins chanting quietly in Enochian, a prayer to his Father, the familiar words rolling off of his tongue smoothly despite his past heresies. He prays for the benefit of the three men with him, finding himself half propped against Sam's side, an arm clamped around his midsection as they edge into the junkyard.

Compared to the stabbing pain in his gut, the slice of the blade is nothing.

Bobby and the Winchesters have been fighting demons for decades now. There are no more capable human hands to be left in on earth than theirs in that battle against the dark. But there is another force amassing on them, and he'd brought it to their doorstep. . . he can _hear_ them coming. As the ringing chimes of his brothers and sisters cloud his mind, beautiful and deadly, as the bright white light descends intent to burn out the mortal eyes, to down them all in one fell sweep. Castiel paints once more in his blood, his chest the canvass, the kitchen knife the brush. He closes his eyes, transfers the knife to his teeth, and slaps his palm to his now mutilated chest.

The spark of his former Grace in its crude soul-like form, so fragile compared to the raging fire it once had been, answers the light of his siblings. The sacrifice of blood and pain and the ancient sigil carved into his flesh sends them back to the Heavens.

He doesn't remember it hurting so much last time he'd done it, and it had affected _him_ then. At least this time, mortal himself, he stays firmly in place. Perspective. He needs it, to keep himself conscious.

The interior of the Impala is a blessedly cool cave as he is dumped unceremoniously onto the back seat, but outside Dean and Sam are fighting against the car, not yet clear enough to make their escape. The roar of an engine announces Bobby's return to their side, and Castiel can hear the old hunter's battered van lay low another demon, at least temporarily.

He almost doesn't hear it over the sound of Singer's home collapsing in on itself, but he's listening carefully over the roar in his ears, drawing the picture for himself of what's happening outside the open car door.

"Son of a . . ." The words cut short in a gargling gasp, pain apparent, and a dull thud against the trunk of the car gives a location.

"Dean!" It's Sam's voice, from the driver's side towards the front, but Cas can hear the fighting there as well. Bobby curses sharply, a pain in his voice that transcends the physical, though he seems farther away as well.

"Get out of her!"

Castiel has braved the deepest, hottest fires of hell twice in his long existence, protracted battles that would have crisped his flesh had he been human, seared him away to nothing but screaming raw nerves that never seemed to deaden. Even for an angel the pain had been unimaginable: but an angel he had been, a warrior of Heaven's elite garrison, and his mission at that point had been crystalline clear.

His impulses had been shaped from those very moments and those orders, the last set of instructions from Heaven, are all that remains unquestioned to this day. From the moment he unintentionally branded himself upon Dean, through yanking Sam's tattered human shell away from Lucifer and Michael, he's known his role. His calling.

Pull the Winchesters from the flames.

He had been too late to entirely save Dean from fate.

He had been outmaneuvered by his elder brothers when pulling Sam from the cage.

Mortal, grievously injured, and facing the armies of heaven and hell, Castiel is _not going to fail again._

He finds the fallen demonblade almost accidentally, toe of his shoe stubbing over it as he shuffles out of the car again. Half crouched already, hugging his injured abdomen, Castiel picks up the knife as he rises, letting the now half-empty canister of salt fall from his fingertips. The figure before him is vaguely familiar from his observations of Sioux Falls, and there's no mistaking the recognition from Dean below her or the genuine concern behind Bobby's desperation. All that matters is that Dean's blood is on her uniform and the sheriff's eyes are now pools of black, a malicious grin spread across her features and her fingernails driven into Dean's chest through his shirt. Jody Mills, friend to the Winchesters and to Bobby, is not in control of her body now. "Oh, I've waited for this, sweetling. You're wanted almost as much as the angel, you know." Dean writhes beneath her touch, twisting, and Castiel knows he has only moments before she bursts his heart in his chest.

The touch of the blade to her throat, his hand coiling her ponytail once around his fist, Castiel casts the dice one last time and hopes his trembling muscles don't betray him. "Let him go."

A purring laugh isn’t the reaction he was hoping for from his command, and he has no particular urge to feel this woman's body press back against him with a lover's familiarity. Around them the fight has seemed to still, Bobby and Sam regrouping, backing towards the car together. This is their battle commander, leading the charge by assigning herself the most dangerous of their quarry. "Mmm, and there you are. Drop the knife, Castiel. We know you're spent, and you're trying oh-so-hard to be one of the good guys to make it up to your Daddy. You can't do it. You know she's one of his precious little flock, she just tastes so _righteous_ doesn't she?"

"Cas, no." Dean cautions as he gets his elbows beneath him on the car's trunk. It takes everything not to betray himself to them, and he's thankful that the pain in his voice sounds rough and wrathful, the lowered tones by her ear malicious rather than winded.

"Do not test my resolve."

"We already have. You caved. You fell. You're one of the cattle now. 'Resolve,' pah. Do it, Castiel. Shed the blood of an innocent woman. It'd be worth my life to break you that much more. I win either way."

"You cannot win. You have been sent here to die. Your King knows that you will fail. You have only two options. Leave this woman. Now. Return to hell and test your luck another day. Or put yourself in _my_ hands."

She snorts and Castiel presses the blade deeper into her throat, raising his voice to drown out the Latin murmurings of Sam, and drawing her back farther to let Dean slide out from beneath her. He prays silently that the hunter notices and finishes the salt circle around them from his clumsy-handed, shaking approach. This is his only chance, and though he knows it plays into Crowley's hands, he has just the once to make this threat. Base theatricality. What a thin shield to protect him, to offer his friends. "How old are you? How old are _any_ of you? You are a blink of an eye to an Angel of the Lord. I have lived _countless_ millennia with a blade in my hands. Can _any_ of you claim the same? I have harried the forces of Hell since the dawn of time. I have rained death and destruction down on my own _kin_ and I have laid waste to scores of humans whose sins pale in comparison to yours. Do you think I will hesitate to make you suffer beyond all imagining if you harm these people? You fear these hunters? Crowley? Lucifer? Michael? I have tested myself against all of them and _I am still standing._ Fear _ME._ "

The salt circle snaps closed at Dean's feet. Sam's exorcism takes hold over Castiel's final roar, and Sheriff Mills bucks in his arms. Turning the demon blade in his hands, he allows her to arc against him unscathed as black smoke pours from her mouth, the demon banished back to hell. Throughout the yard, the levee breaks: their leader's apparent snap in courage scatters the rest like herd beasts.

Castiel slumps as the sheriff's limp body folds, unable to support them both. Bobby catches Jody before she hits the hard-packed dirt, and Castiel finds himself hauled bodily back to his feet by Dean.

"Cas, are you. . .?"

"Goading the enemy." Another lesson well learned, though he had adapted for circumstances. It is the first time he has ever managed a bluff in his right mind. Part of him, some dark twisting portion of his former madness, wonders how much of it _was_ bluff—half-truths and bravado, but the sentiment. . . the fury, the pride, the covetous pull he feels towards these people. . . that is entirely genuine.

Dean's relieved laughter drives the thoughts away for the moment, and this time Castiel makes it into the car slightly more gracefully and almost under his own power. Once prone on the seat, the danger passed, he allows himself to slip consciousness, trusting the hunters to see them away.

Outside, Bobby arranges the sheriff's unconscious body more comfortably, the quiet confirmations of each living host a win, though with a price. Both Winchesters and Bobby watch the chimney, the last portion of the home standing, fall in a cloud of broken bricks into the crackling fire. They have bought a little time at best to get as far from the smoking ruins as they can.

Time to run.


	6. Chapter 6

They've long crossed the South Dakota line into Minnesota and put over a hundred miles between them and the unexplainable mess at Bobby's before Dean is willing to pull over the Impala. He coasts them into a truck stop and gas station in Blue Earth, leaving his brother with strict instructions to keep an eye on the fallen angel unconscious in their back seat and be careful peeling off the tape setting around the still freshly replaced windshield of the Impala.

He ignores the mocking jibes about the equal amount of worry he's showing for his baby as his angel. A man's allowed to have multiple concerns, and Sam's heart isn't in it. Two hours of silent driving isn't enough to shake what they've just walked away from and the questions it raises in both men. It's still too early to talk about it.

The sprawling convenience store provides a temporary distraction. They're hungry, tired, and battered, and after slapping the cash down on the counter to pay for gas, Dean sets into the aisles with a purpose. A case of water. Snacks. More painkillers and gauze. Apple pie whose box swears it was baked that morning. Coffee that _was_ made that morning and is probably no better for sitting on the burner that long. And finally, the touristy portion he usually manages to avoid on their travels.

Castiel's clothing isn't going to magically fix itself this time around. For some reason, throwing cheap jeans, a graphic t-shirt and a jacket onto the counter for the angel twists something in the pit of his stomach, and his gaze begins to wander the rack at the register.

He's missing something. So close. Something is bothering him and he can't put his finger what it is, until eventually he's digging through the local newspaper looking for who-knows-what. He doesn't find what he's looking for but he buys the paper anyway to shut the clerk up and stalks out to the car again, where Sam is throwing away the last sticky bundle of tape, his cell phone pinned to his ear.

". . . glad Jody's okay. Yeah. Yeah, you let us know when you get there, we'll meet up in a couple of days. And Bobby? I know I said it, but I'm sor. . ." Dropping the phone from his shoulder, Sam checks it as if to see if he lost signal, before shaking his head. "He'll load up that storage room, get the books, then meet us down the road."

"Still refusing the apology?"

"Same thing. He has most of it as copies elsewhere, the place was old and full of bad memories anyway, and we all lived." Scrubbing a hand over his hair, leaving it in a too-long disarray, Sam shakes his head. "I don't know what to say to him."

"Well, saying 'I'm sorry' over and over doesn't seem to be getting you anywhere, so why don't you let it drop until he says otherwise?" Dean doesn't wait for a response, slipping into the driver's seat and reaching behind him to dump the bags on the floorboard in the back. "Cas. Cas, man, need you to wake up."

Folding himself into the passenger's seat, Sam shoots a brief sullen look at his brother, shaking his head without dropping the former topic. "You're as bad as Bobby."

"Yeah, well, I had to learn it somewhere." Reaching out, Dean slaps the side of Castiel's foot with the back of his hand, sending him awake with a lurch and a groan. "Cas, I need you to get outta that shirt. We'll get a room up the road a bit, but we need you looking a little less like an extra from _Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ before we go anywhere. And take two more of those pills I gave you, they'll help."

Red-rimmed eyes, hollow cheeks, the purpling bruise from Dean's fist creeping along his jaw, and dark hair a complete disarray, Castiel shoots Dean a sour, exhausted look in the rearview mirror as Dean eases them back out onto the interstate, but the back seat remains silent save for the rustling of the plastic bags for the moment. Not everyone feels compelled to talk about their feelings on the situation constantly. It reaffirms his faith in the rest of the world that at least Cas has the sense God didn't give Sammy.

Bad phrasing. In several ways. Plus he’s beginning to get the feeling that Castiel’s patterning his human behavior a little too closely off of Dean's worst habits. He'll know for sure if he finds Cas drinking alone in the dark, or putting the moves on random pretty women in their travels just to pass the time.

The thought's disquieting, another callback to the sense of wrongness that is niggling at his subconscious. "How you doing back there, Cas?" Flicking his gaze back to the rearview, Dean catches a glimpse of bare shoulders and the top of Castiel's head, while Sam turns in his seat, letting out a low hiss of sympathetic pain at what he sees.

"Those cuts are going to scar, Cas. And we need to get you restitched, you're bleeding again."

"I'll be fine. I'm finding I have a high tolerance for pain." Castiel meticulously cuts strips of medical tape, sawing at it with the bloodied kitchen knife before Sam shifts in his seat and hands him a pocket knife, plucking at it to bring out the tiny utility scissors. "Keep it. I've got another." They’re going to need to get Cas a full kit together. Not just hunting supplies but. . . well, everything, from IDs to fake credit cards of his own, to the day-to-day tools they need just to get by.

It's then that Dean puts his finger on what's bothering him, watching the broken center line of the highway until Sam's voice calls him back again. "Dean! Where'd you go there, man? I've been talking for five minutes now, and you've missed at least four opportunities to make fun of my height while we drive past all the signs for the sixty-foot tall statue of the Jolly Green Giant."

"It was very green." Castiel remarks tonelessly, and Dean feels the muscles in his jaw bunch as he looks up to see Cas in his rearview again, carefully applying peroxide to the self-inflicted cuts on his chest, haggard and bloodstained, and very _human._

"So how long is this gonna last this time, Cas?"

Sam tenses beside him at the tone, though Castiel continues doctoring his injuries. "I don't know what you mean."

"Yeah, I think you do. There's a lot you're not telling us right now about how this works. You've fallen before . . ."

"Rebelled." It's a correction, his tone moderated into his usual gruff, even responses, and Dean finds it infuriating him as much now as it did in the beginning. "Disobeyed."

"What does that even _mean_?"

"It 'means,' I rebelled." Castiel air-quotes awkwardly as he looks up, fixing a scowl on Dean that has as much to do with pain and exhaustion as impatience, and Dean wants to smack whoever had taught him sarcasm even fully aware there’s no one to blame but himself. "I defied my Father and my family and turned my back on Heaven. Several times. Each of those times there were consequences for estranging myself from the Host. When you turn your back on Heaven, when you practice Disobedience, they call you Fallen, but to truly Fall is. . ."

"Mortality. Human." Sam supplies into his pause, and after a moment Castiel nods. "Like Anna."

"Yeah, and Anna angel'd herself back up pretty soon after she remembered, too. So what's it going to be, Cas? Just slumming it down here with us until you get the juice back?" Dean knows he's being unreasonably angry, knows it's coming from seemingly nowhere, knows it's the stress. . . but there is something none of them are talking about. Not Crowley, not the demons, he doubts the angels, and sure as hell not Cas who he _needs_ to hear it from.

He wants Cas to fight. To rise to the bait and give him something he can push back against, and for a moment he looks like he may. Jaw clenching, Castiel closes his eyes and ducks his head down, a gesture somehow fragile for the bare shoulders that Dean has never seen before, and falls still. Not an unearthly still, perhaps, but there are shades of it nonetheless. Dean’s primary ability is the talent of infuriating every creature on Earth, Heaven, and Hell, and he has jammed his finger down on Castiel's buttons pretty hard.

Letting his breath out slowly, as if signaling the end of some silent prayer for strength, Castiel raises his gaze to Dean in the rearview again, and shakes his head slightly. "Dean, I'm _not going back._ This isn't a suppression of my angelic abilities, or being sapped of the strength of unity and faith, my Grace is _gone_. I carved it out on the way down. There are. . . nuances that are missed in your concept of 'Fallen.'"

"Like degrees of severity?" Sam inquires, the dutiful student, and Dean finds it infuriating that Sam can take it so academically, so calmly. So much of Dean's anger with Cas has been wrapped into what he'd done to Sam. The line he'd crossed, that a solemn nod in the shadows of Bobby's garage couldn't erase entirely.

"Yes." There's a rustling of the plastic bags, and Castiel reemerges into the rearview, shrugging the jacket onto his shoulders like a blanket rather than try to ease the t-shirt over his injuries. Drawing the jacket around him without closing it, he leans his head against the window, shutting his eyes again. "Degrees of sin. I turned against our principal law and was punished for it. I 'fell' from favor, from family, and power. Lucifer, and those who rebelled with him, they were cast out, dragged down by Michael to the pit. But to Fall. . . I severed my Grace from Heaven, and then ripped it out of myself."

Dean notes Sam's shift in gaze to the seeping gauze-swathed wound in Castiel's abdomen, and the frown that accompanies it. "But if your Grace is like your soul . . ."

"A soul is a spark of the same material from which my Father fashioned us all. I kept a spark in this body. Anna, she sent one on to a human mother to bear." Dean's knuckles are white on the wheel, thoughts of mutilated souls fresh on the mind. Even with his eyes determinedly fixed on the road, Dean knows Castiel is watching him again; he can feel Cas’s stare. "I made a choice. I've made many choices I regret, since I learned of my own free will." There is a great deal untouched there, a well of remorse that no apology can begin to convey, for both of the boys in the car with him. "This is not one of those regrets."

"This is supposed to be the solution then? Bit of penance, doing your time down here before getting back to 'God's work.'?"

"Dean. . ." Sam's attempts to curb him only serve to make him angrier, and he cuts his brother off with a sideways glare.

"Sam, he's right to be angry. You both are."

"I'm not. . ." Sam begins.

"You are." Settling himself down more securely against the sidewall of the car, Castiel rests his cheek against the glass, welcoming the cold on his bruises. "Dean, I have come to believe that the one thing my Father asks of those who practice their Free Will is that they live with the consequences of those choices, regardless of how they turn out. It's time I did the same."

The car falls silent again, tense and contemplative in turns, until half an hour later the drugs and exhaustion take hold and Castiel's buzzsaw snores fill the interior, prompting Dean to toss a tape in and turn it down just to give himself something else to focus on. Sam quietly works his way through the crossword puzzle of the abandoned newspaper in the bag. The silence doesn't last. Never does. "Didn't expect _I'd_ end up defending Cas to _you_ , Dean."

"There's nothing to defend." It's brusque, voice kept low to not wake up their passenger, a dismissal of the conversation, but Sam is like a dog after a bone every time he sees something eating at his brother like this.

"Dean, he just . . ."

"I know what he did, Sam, I was there. I'm not. . . look, I meant everything I said back at Bobby's. He's Cas, he's one of ours. This isn't about that, about dragging up everything. This is about what's happening _now."_ Tilting the rearview mirror, Dean centers it on Castiel to confirm he's still asleep, taking in his battered appearance, the long line of pale skin and stripes of torn flesh visible beneath his jacket. Wrenching his eyes away, he turns his head slightly to look at his brother. "The guy was God for a while there, Sam, capital G, and he ripped out his mojo. He wants to spend the rest of his life a human, travelling with us? I'm good with that. . ."

Both of Sam's eyebrows rise sharply at the idea of Dean unhesitating about accepting _anyone_ into their duo for the rest of a lifetime. Dean ignores it, continuing in the low, roughened whisper.

". . . What I'm _not_ okay with is that no one's talking about the fact that 'God' just dumped all of his power on earth somewhere, and it's just waiting for Crowley or one of those angel dicks to pick it up. Look what it did to him, what he became. . . and that was _Cas_ , Sam." He knows that they'd questioned his trust in Castiel before, his faith. They started it again, the moment he dragged Cas unconscious and bleeding into the car and right back into their lives. But none of them can contest that things could have been a lot worse with that power in anyone else's hands but his guardian angel.

He knows Sam has gotten on the same page by the silence from the passenger's seat, and then the low invective.

"Crowley's trying to play us. Keep us too busy running to work out where Cas's Grace ended up."

"Yeah. I think so." Sighing, Dean begins scanning the signs, looking for a likely exit for an out-of-the-way motel room. "I need to know, Sam. I care about the guy, he's family, I'll go to the mat for him just like he has for us. But after everything today I have to know if he'd go off the deep end again if we get his mojo back."

"What, just. . . deify him again?"

"Cas doesn't want it. _That's_ what I needed to know. That and whether he was just missing that he dropped an armed nuke on the planet, or if he'd handled it somehow."

"What do you think he meant to . . ."

The turn-off is sharp enough that Cas wakes with a start, and Dean's strangely relieved by it. Whispered conversations with Sam behind Castiel's back aren't exactly what Dean had in mind when he said they'd keep him travelling with them. This is something they need to address. Just not. . . yet. Not until he’s sure.

"Button up for now, Cas, we're getting a room and we'll get you cleaned off and patched up. Sam here'll go pick up some more clothes for you, get you a bag of your own to live out of." And as he zips his leather jacket over the tears in his shirt and slips out of the Impala to get them checked in, he meets his brother's gaze over the car and nods once. "Make some calls and grab the paper."

They need to start looking for falling stars and miracles.


	7. Chapter 7

Dean can hear through the thin motel walls the moment the shower spray hits Castiel, the sharp yelp of pain audible even as he's tossing a bag onto the bed, digging through for the salt. Raising his voice to be heard in the other room, he can't resist helpfully offering "High pain tolerance, Cas? The moral you should learn here is to _stop carving yourself up_ now that you're going to have to deal with it like everyone else."

The growled response he receives, Castiel most assuredly learned from him. Nearly any other day, reducing an Angel of the Lord to profanities would be something that Dean, being who he is, would find cause to celebrate. Castiel _successfully_ stringing together an insult (this is, after all, the angel who thinks "Hey, assbutt" qualified as acceptable last words while dying to save the world) would be enough to buy the man a drink. Today, he contents himself with a faint smirk before the grim purpose of his work takes hold. Before they leave, they'll scuff the salt line into the thin motel carpet to be vacuumed up later. Until then, he fortifies even knowing they'll only stay the single night.

The stakes, for every Hunter, are inherently personal. No one enters their line of work without someone to avenge, someone to save, but for the Winchesters things keep ratcheting up to ridiculous degrees. At least the last time Heaven and Hell alike had come after them, they'd wanted the matching set and they'd wanted them alive.

This mess with Castiel. . .

Dumping the duffle bag from the trunk onto Sam's bed, Dean methodically begins separating out supplies. A bowie knife. A pistol his father had trained him on. A spare clip of ammo. A flask of Holy Water and a blessed rosary (both items with a certain degree of irony). A Swiss Army knife. Lockpicks. A stub of chalk. Book of matches. Hex bag. After a moment, he throws in his father's old cellphone in case they become separated. It'll do for the day-to-day to start with, until they figure out identities and credit cards, and get him trained on everything.

Sam can handle getting clothes and grocery shopping. Dean is dealing with the _necessities_.

He speaks up again only when the sink shuts off and he can hear the click of the bathroom lock.

"I was starting to think you'd drowned in there. You leave any hot water for . . ."

The bathroom door opens with a billow of steam as Dean is carefully slipping the point of his knife beneath a picture on one of the fake IDs, laptop open on the table before him. When he looks up the knife point slips, taking a sliver of the skin on his thumb with it.

"Shit." Catching the side of his thumb in his mouth to stem the blood, he glares at Castiel as he shifts in the doorway, uncertain, as if he's done something wrong. Which he has, unquestionably. Flushed from the heat, the cheap off-brand jeans riding low on his hips, the angry red lines of the angel-banishing sigil carved into his chest are seeping blood again after the shower and the gauze over his abdomen is a wet, blood-soaked wreck. With the complimentary toiletries kit the motel gave them, he's combed his hair to make it lay flat and then shaved.

It's a disorienting combination of what’s wrong with the current situation, a cracked open, bruised and bleeding human Castiel, and the neatly groomed nightmare he'd become when he'd turned wrath-of-God on the world. Dean has the inexplicable urge to rumple him up a bit. Or to drown him in layers of overly stuffy tax-accountant-of-the-Lord. Or . . .

Clearing his throat, Dean drops his thumb from his mouth, pinching the cut closed, and inexplicably Castiel smiles at him. It's not much, but it's a softening around the corners of his lips and a brightening of his eyes as he shakes his head slightly, and Dean's been around him long enough to recognize he's found something amusing. "You should 'stop carving yourself up.'"

"Says the poster boy for self-mutilation. Shut up and get on the bed."

The words come out rough, his voice hoarse, and Castiel's expression blanks carefully, blue eyes widening and fixed on Dean unblinkingly. Shifting the bundle of tattered, soot-stained fabric that comprises the last of his former attire in his hands, he stops by the bedside to tuck it into the trash before taking a seat on the foot of the bed, fists resting on his knees, facing Dean at the table. Suddenly Dean _can't_ read him, and that's just as disorienting as a half-naked bleeding former Superman. But Castiel is watching him the way he always seems to, proving from their first conversation that he sees far more than he should, understands far more than he's supposed to, and Dean's always been of two minds on that.

No one, not Sam, not Lisa, or Bobby, or Cassie, definitely not his father, has ever invested the amount of time into trying to understand Dean that Castiel has. Dean hasn't ever let himself be the focus of any of those relationships. It's not a role he's comfortable with: whatever his brash demeanor, he has played a supporting role in their lives. Still, he's never shied away from Castiel's stare or flinched from what the angel saw.

Castiel has seen him at his absolute worst, entrenched in hell, a razor in his hand and a dead-man's rictus smile on his lips at being saved the pain for just one more day. Castiel has seen him at his best, putting aside his own crippling doubts and fears because destiny, heaven, hell, God, Lucifer, Michael. . . none of them could dictate their fate for them. Through it all, start to finish, he believed—believed that Dean still deserved to be saved, to have someone answering his prayers.

Dean wonders what Castiel sees now, when he doesn't himself know _what_ he is thinking. He isn't going to ask. Too many things in Dean's head need to stay the hell away from being placed under a microscope. Particularly by Castiel. "Take off the gauze and lay back, we need to fix your stitches."

Focusing on Castiel's injuries makes it easier to look at him and as Castiel's long narrow fingers peel off the useless wet medical tape, his gaze shifting away from Dean to the task at hand, Dean finds himself free to move again. Grabbing the dental floss and needle, he shifts out of the chair and stalks to the bed, leaving the identities spread across the table.

Despite the obvious manifestation of Dean's anger with him in the stain of bruise across his jaw, his split and swollen lower lip, Castiel moves further onto the bed and entrusts himself to Dean, though by the tilt of his head, the quickening flutter of his pulse visible in his neck and the narrowing of his eyes, Dean has to wonder if Castiel is afraid.

_Shouldn't trust run both ways?_

It's another uncomfortable memory, interrupted when Cas hisses in pain and stops his movement, braced on his elbows reclining on the bed. "I apologize. When the demon threw me . . ."

Dean's already stepping around the bed, taking a knee to see for himself, and his low growl of displeasure interrupts. "Damnit, Cas, you should have told me you'd gotten burned." Dean knows he’s quick to anger right now, jumping to it as a defense against his own thoughts, and he knows blaming Castiel for his own injuries is ridiculous. It doesn't stop him, though. "You're crap at being human, Cas. You _trying_ to get yourself killed here?"

Silence answers him and Dean grinds his teeth together, grabbing the first-aid kit out of the duffle bag on Sam's bed. He doesn't hesitate before slipping onto the bed with Castiel, ignoring the twanging tension the action seems to put into Castiel's bare shoulders, muscles moving beneath smooth skin. The burn isn't terrible, all told, a line of scorched flesh slightly wider than Dean's hand, heel to fingertips, running horizontally across Castiel's back where he hit the beam, but Cas left it unattended for the hours since, and as an apparent connoisseur of pain Dean knows nothing hurts quite so badly as a burn.

No wonder he'd cried out from the shower.

Taking Castiel's shoulders between his hands Dean sits him up again, settling onto his heels on the bed behind the angel, trying to ignore how Castiel's skin is warm and damp from the shower and how he can see the path each tooth of the comb took through his wet hair. "Keep still," he warns unnecessarily, for Castiel becomes pliant from the moment Dean's hand curls over his shoulder, an unconscious mimicry of the grasp that had branded Castiel's palm print permanently upon Dean's flesh.

He pries his fingers off Castiel's skin and grabs the first aid kit, swallowing thickly and reaching for that shield of anger again. "I am not going to watch you go around trying to kill yourself, Cas. This going out in a blaze of glory shit, it's going to stop. Now."

_Don't make me lose you too._

Castiel turns his head slightly, watching Dean over his shoulder, blue eyes narrowed and seemingly all-knowing. He should be angry at the inherent hypocrisy of this speech coming from Dean of all people, but he doesn't rise to the bait. "I am not trying to die."

"Could have fooled me."

"Doubtful." Cas closes his eyes as Dean's fingertips graze his burned skin, spreading the cooling balm of medicine across the cracked and blistered flesh, and Dean tries not to notice how his bruised lips part around his relieved sigh or how he seems to arch into the touch.

"Bullshit. Trust me, Cas, you had me going for a while there pretending to be on our side, pretending to. . ."

"Shut up. Now." Fury. Between one word and the next Castiel has become a pillar of stone beneath his hands, his eyes opening and fixing on Dean's face, blue eyes electric. Even without supernatural power to back the threat in his tone Dean nearly swallows his tongue. Castiel has always been dangerous, and for just this moment he doesn't look like a broken shell of a human; he is a force of nature.

Drawing a leg onto the bed he turns to face Dean more squarely, and his voice has dropped a register and become gravelly and coarse. "Dean, we have had this conversation. Again, and again. I lied. I deceived you. But I have never 'pretended' to be on your side. I chose wrongly, but I did what I felt I had to do to protect _you_. Even after, I have never been your enemy."

Dean refuses to look away, refuses to break under the stare, and shakes his head abruptly as if throwing off the weight of Castiel's gaze like a physical restraint being torn away. "Yeah, you and I remember things a bit differently."

"I remember that even then, when you prayed to me I came for you, Dean. Even when you had done everything in your power to harm me, even after Sam put a sword through my back, you asked for my help and I delivered it."

_I don't know. I just pray to God it's true. . . Seriously, though, Bobby. Look at our lives, how many more hits can we take? So if Sam says he's good, good. . . . but we never catch a break. So why would we this time? But just. . . just this one thing, you know? But I'm not dumb. I'm not going to get my hopes up. . ._

Sam screamed in pain, bathed in light in the recesses of Dean's memories, and collapsed to his knees whole once more with Castiel is watching him now just as earnestly as he had then, just as guardedly hopeful.

_Faith. Your faith, Dean. That's all I have ever asked for._

"You're still such a frikkin' child, Cas." He doesn't know where the words are coming from any more, drawing them from the deep reservoir of half-buried resentment that is breaking down, washing over him, and he lets that tide take him. "It doesn't change what you did."

Castiel turns his face away, shifting on the bed once again to drop his feet to the floor, picking up the needle and the dental floss as he lets his hope for forgiveness drain out of him with his shaking breath. "I am not a child. But I know. This changes nothing."

His hands tremble slightly as he threads the needle inexpertly, and Dean takes the opportunity to watch Castiel unobserved. How many times has Dean hoped for an end, himself? How many times has he lost all hope, and kept on fighting because he didn't know how to do anything else. He recognizes the look of a man trying to find any dry land in a flood.

Castiel freezes when Dean's hand touches his back again, finishing the sweep of medicine over the burn methodically. It is not a lingering caress but to Castiel it feels like a benediction, like hope and forgiveness and home and surcease from pain: all the things the faithful imagine of Heaven, and Castiel has only ever experienced from Dean Winchester. He bows his head and lets his hands go limp, eyes falling closed.

"Thank you," he offers into the silence and he doesn’t attempt to pretend his gratitude is for the medicine.

"Yeah." Dean responds simply, and Castiel knows neither of them want to reveal much more of themselves into this conversation and this moment.

When Sam returns, Dean is finishing the final stitches in a silence that has proven more comfortable than discussion between them. Stopping in the doorway, shopping bags and a newspaper in hand, Sam looks at his brother kneeling beside the half-clothed broken angel reclining across the bed, wrinkles his nose, and shakes his head. "Wow, that's just weird."

Castiel opens an eye a crack to look at him in the doorway. Dean cocks an eyebrow, frozen in place. Sam smirks, and jerks his chin at Castiel. "His hair."

Dean throws his hands up as if his brother has revealed something fundamentally wrong in the world. "Yeah! I know. He _combed_ it."

"I'm missing something. What's the significance?"

"That's your 'I am the Lord, your God' hair."

Castiel stares at Sam blankly, and then turns his head and silently begs Dean to explain.

"You only ever look clean shaved and put together when you've gone off the deep end, man. It's weird." Pushing himself off of the bed and putting away the first aid kit, Dean reaches out a hand to ruffle Castiel's hair as if he's erasing evidence or putting the entire world to right. As if he hasn't been considering doing so since Cas walked out of the bathroom. As if he can't feel Cas lean into the touch like a cat into a caress. "There."

As Dean pads away to the other bed and begins explaining everything he's chosen for Castiel to carry day to day, as Sam throws a flannel button-up shirt at him, Castiel stares blankly, swallows once, reaches into the pocket of his jeans, and drops the plastic motel comb into the bedside trash.

Both brothers pretend not to notice.


	8. Chapter 8

In his dreams, he is always falling. The stomach-churning tumble, the bone snapping force of his fall. . . and perhaps worst of all, he wakes with the phantom pain of his wings—ripped, torn, and ablaze. Long after he wakes, he feels himself trying to flex muscles that simply no longer exist, an amputee whose mind remembers what he no longer has and fills in the pain of that loss.

Castiel thinks that is the worst: worse than the dreams of hell, or the memories of his madness is that pain that follows him through the day. . . until the night his eyes close on a seedy motel room in Wisconsin, and reopen in Heaven.

It isn't familiar, but he has no trouble divining whose Heaven he has found himself in. Beneath him is the cooling hood of the Impala where he reclines stretched out along it, back to the windshield, eyes to a night sky lit with fireworks. Laughter rings like disembodied ghosts, a heaven without its intended occupant, full of the spirit and the ambiance like a comfortable home whose owners had stepped out only moments before: you can still feel them and there is the promise they will return soon.

Castiel feels like a thief slipping into that haven uninvited while its owner is away only to find a murderer lying in wait.

He feels Hester's ice blue eyes before he sees her, the dour black business suit she favors making her blend into the scenery while everything else of her refuses to adapt to the setting. Her golden hair never reflects the light of the fireworks, her expression never relaxes into the peace imbued in the scene, and she seems to pay no attention to the environment save the man before her.

"You're disgusting."

"Hello, little sister." Castiel counters with a calm he does not feel.

"You _dare_ address me that way, after everything you've done?" Her heels don't crunch on the gravel as she approaches the car, and Castiel wonders if it's simply his perception rejecting her presence in this place. It would be an interesting philosophical study, except that he can _feel_ her, feel her rage and her power and her intentions.

"With 'everything I've done,' Hester, my manner of address to you is hardly the most daring." He feels like he should be running, as if he should be reaching for an angelic blade and taking to battle with her, but he has spent millennia as an angel in Heaven. He knows the futility of such acts for him as he is: were this a normal dream, perhaps he could manipulate the environment or simply snap himself out of it. His strength of will is by no means inconsiderable, after all. However. . .

He can feel his brothers and sisters around him, hear their silent speech ringing in his mind clear as a bell, and his senses stretch towards those unseen figures waiting in the wings while his words remain for the creature who had been his right hand in the civil war, who had stood by him when his success was by no means assured.

He should have known that it would be her. She's making a public spectacle of it, showing the rest of his garrison the truth of his fall. Her loyalty to him had never been out of love and now she sees opportunity.

"You can't kill me here, Hester. You can't compel me to reveal where I am. You will not convince me to return, even were that your intention. Why bring me here?"

"Three reasons. First, I wanted you to see this." Her hand sweeps not towards the environment, the most personal, cherished memory of a man who is sleeping some six feet away from him on a pull-out couch in a run-down motel, but to Castiel himself. It's the first he's taken notice of his appearance in this display of his sister's, but he finds himself more surprised by the changes in his spiritual form than perhaps he should be. His concept of himself in Heaven has been remarkably consistent since he found his true vessel—but gone are the trench coat, the suit, the tie, how he has envisioned himself, how he has always manifested to the Winchesters.

The blue and gray checked flannel is a personal favorite of his based on a passing backhand compliment from the Winchesters after a waitress had spent more time flirting with him than taking their order at a roadside diner. The situation had made him uncomfortable and eventually the waitress had apparently determined he was at best hopelessly inept and at worst uninterested (both true), but the teasing compliments from Dean and Sam had registered. His first pair of blue jeans are cheap and already worn threadbare across the knees, but more comfortable for it, and secured with a belt that also serves to anchor his holster and knife. A military surplus store in Minnesota had yielded both the dufflebag that Castiel knows is tucked against the bed he is sleeping on, and the black jacket and broken in boots he has encased himself in. He has reshaped and redefined his very spirit in the short time he has been human.

"A week, Castiel. You have been with those foul, insidious redneck gorillas for a _week_ and you're aping their mannerisms, letting them twist you further to their aims, mold you into their schemes. You're their _pet_ , Castiel. You have been since the moment you pulled Dean Winchester from the pit, falling all over yourself for the favor of a _human_. Do you even know for sure what they're doing with you?"

"Saving my life." Raising his eyes, he watches Hester evenly, attempting to keep the anger at her taunting from his voice and his manner. This is Heaven and he is among his siblings, though; he can feel them register the emotional response. He offers no argument this time against his attachment to the Winchesters, to _Dean_ , and he makes no attempt to explain. It will only serve to build the spectacle for Hester if he resorts to easily dismantled lies.

The corners of her lips curl faintly, her head cocked to the side as she listens to the Seraphim around her, the sway of their favor and judgment.

"Do you feel saved, Castiel?" Spreading her hands she indicates the Heaven around them, now. "Your 'hero' has died before, more often than any human can claim. Heaven and hell, he has his rooms set aside in both. Shall we warm this one for him?" Her ice-blue eyes turn from him, razing over the environment. "I can destroy it. _We_ can destroy it. Burn down the house while he's away and give him nothing to return to."

"No!" The thought chills Castiel and he knows that his ringing voice has revealed him. There's triumph in Hester's eyes as she turns back to him.

"You're in love with a human, 'Cas.'" Contempt drips from her lips as she uses the nickname he adopted so readily. He remembers the first time he unthinkingly invited Uriel to address him as such, how it spread through the ranks to his brothers and sisters. And now he can see how Hester has used it, feel it resonate among them. Castiel. Cas. He has mutilated himself, his psyche, sliced away his Grace and even cut God from his name.

"And you are falling prey to pride, Hester. Ambition. It's an infection, and it has spread through your mind and unmade you. You would destroy the last hope of a good man to . . ."

"A 'good man,'" she sneers, interrupting him, stalking closer to where he remains perched atop the Impala with his booted feet resting on the bumper, hands fisted into the sleeves of his shirt to keep him from reacting hastily. "Dean Winchester is a _disease_ , 'Cas.' From the moment you pulled him from Hell, he has polluted your mind and clouded your judgment. We _followed_ you into that, we believed that you were right about the Apocalypse, that our Father had a greater purpose in mind. I see now, what He intends. You are our cautionary tale, 'Cas.' _Look at yourself._ Where do you stand? _"_

He doesn't remember rising. Doesn't remember closing the distance between them as she slung insults about Dean. He registers his clenched fists, muscles corded and ready to throw the first punch as the urge to do violence runs through his trembling muscles. He has played directly into her hands, betrayed himself. Jaw clenched, he forces a measured breath and takes a single step back from her, distance for control. When he responds, he does so with the voice that once commanded these angels; firm and carrying and unrepentant. He is tired of denials, tired of the charade, tired of lies, and unashamed. "I stand with the Winchesters."

Hester has won. She has secured the loyalty of the angels, picked it up where Castiel has sliced it away. She nods, once, into the ringing choir of intent and dangerous purpose they both can feel, that spark of Grace that Castiel has tried to shape into a Soul still too attuned to being an angel to protect him from what he can now hear is coming. What he knew all along awaited him.

Castiel has turned his back on Heaven before, for the Winchesters and been pulled back to it. Then, the indoctrination was meant to put him back on track, to force him to toe the line and to divorce himself from the emotional connection he felt to the Winchesters. To Dean. Now, when Hester's palm presses to his forehead, the will of the garrison singularly focused and lending her strength, there is no illusion of the positive outcome.

It's not about 'saving him' with the sharp slap of redirection.

It's about the punishment.

The _pain_.

This is not the first time Castiel has been tortured by the Host of Heaven for his loyalties.

 

* * *

 

Back on Earth it's a quiet that pulls Dean from his fitful slumber on the sprung couch mattress that he volunteered to brave to give the still recovering Castiel a bed and because Sam's freakishly long legs would hang off the end. He managed to lull himself to sleep listening to the alternating snoring of the room's other two occupants, but something in that has changed now. He thinks maybe Castiel has simply woken up, and dropping his arm from over his eyes he lifts his head from the lumpy pillow, his voice low.

"Go back to sleep, Cas, it's too damned early to. . ."

The red neon light of the motel sign shining through the obscuring haze of the curtain paints the room in a faint, bloody tinge and offers just enough illumination to see Castiel arch off the bed again, his whole body caught in the wake of something that looks like electric shock and falls into the unceasing tremor of a seizure, all in silence. Dean explodes out of the bed with a curse on his lips, ignoring the harsh light of Sam slapping the bedside lamp on, gun in his hand as he blearily tries to understand what's happening.

"Belt!" Dean's voice has an edge of fear that Sam responds to instinctively, grabbing Dean's belt from where it's looped over the back of a chair and throwing it to him. Dean catches it one-handed, the other drawing Castiel up against his chest, clamping his arms to his sides, pinning him into place in Dean's lap. Sam helps him slip the strip of leather between his teeth to keep him from biting off his own tongue.

Resting the side of his head against Castiel's, his chin on the other man's shoulder, Dean feels the phantom of electricity, the wash of ions leaving the hair on his arms standing on edge, while Castiel spasms beneath the full force of it as if hit by lightning. Looking up he sees the same understanding and horror in Sam's eyes as his brother pries his fingers off of Castiel's ankle, resisting the electric sting coursing through him. "He's being attacked."

"Get the damn books! Circle of salt, Holy Fire, I don't care. . ." They can burn the motel down around them, if they have to, in order to stop this.

Sam doesn't have the chance. As if Dean's panic has called to him Castiel's eyes snap open, somehow all the more blue for being bloodshot. His face contorts in pain before he crumples bonelessly in place, braced up only by Dean's strength and determination, the tooth-marked belt falling to the floor.

The next moments pass in stunned silence, in harsh breathing that borders on sobs. Dean slowly allows Castiel use of his arms again as Sam joins them on the bed, sitting on the edge and helping Castiel wrap his hands around a plastic cup of water, while Dean keeps his place cradling Castiel to his chest, securing him in case of another fit, bracing him upright for the drink.

"What the hell was that?" Dean finally asks, his former panic giving way to anger, but Castiel knows it isn't aimed at him this time. There's a note of hysteria that were Castiel more composed he would be able to hide, to swallow down to spare them it, but he can't quite restrain the mad huff of shaking laughter at the question. Hell had nothing to do with it.

"No. . . That was _Heaven."_


	9. Chapter 9

Dean paces the perimeter of the motel room like a caged animal, all rage and concern and impatience tied up in the desperate need to do _something_ and the feeling of helplessness at not knowing what. Sam sits perched on the end of his bed, flyaway hair and a look of concern in his hazel eyes, more composed than his brother but no less focused on the problem. On the foot of the opposite bed, hands pressed to his closed eyelids and head bowed, Castiel has ceased shaking and pushed away the agonizing ache of his abused muscles, quieting his thoughts, lips moving silently.

No matter how he paces, Dean is continually drawn to the broken angel in the Blue Earth t-shirt and sweatpants, sitting pale and wan on the bed. Dean's brow furrows as he loses patience again, fists unclenching. Sam catches him by the wrist before he can walk past and try to interrogate Castiel, and he looks up at his brother from his seat on the other bed. "Give him a minute."

"To _what_? Mutter? We need to _know. . ._ " Compared to Sam's death-bed hush, Dean's words are rough and coarse, but Castiel doesn't move.

"I know, Dean. I get it. Trust me, I get it. You're worried. Just _give him a minute_. I think. . . I think he's praying." For all that Dean and Castiel share a ‘profound bond,’ it is often Sam who speaks up on behalf of Cas. It falls to Sam to point out Castiel’s limitations to Dean, who has less patience and higher expectations for Castiel, and Cas attempts to meet them even when he’s tapped out. Sam is more objective when it comes to Cas, and right now he thinks the angel needs that. 

Dean growls incomprehensibly under his breath, draws the straight-backed chair over from the motel table and turns it, straddling it and folding his arms on the back, face like a thundercloud, a scant distance away from Cas. "Praying to _who?_ God ain't listening, the angels _are_ the problem, and it's not like anyone's ever on our side."

"When _your_ father was missing, did you leave him messages just to feel connected to him, even if he never responded?" There's no real question to Castiel's low, rough remark, he knows the truth of it. Raising his head from his hands he fixes a look on Dean that is both weary and aggravated in equal measure. "I am not deaf. I can hear you. And I can hear _them_."

It's all the incentive Dean needs to throw himself into the questions that he's been bottling up for the past hour, since Castiel shakily chased pain medication with a too-generous pull of Dean's whiskey straight from the bottle and fell into silence, ignoring Dean's growing impatience. "Who did that to you? What _was_ that?" The implication is clear. Castiel knows that Dean is nearly brash enough to try and lay siege to heaven itself for attacking his ‘family.’

And he would die.

"Hester. She is. . . was. . . my second." It's not enough information for Dean, he can see it, but excessive exposition wouldn't really tell them any more. They know the motivation, they understand the powers of Heaven, and deep down, whether or not Dean wishes to admit it, they know that this time the angels are _right_.

"Okay, so how did she get to you?" Sam, the calm voice of practical reason, is dealing with the present.

"And how do we kick her teeth in if she tries it again?" Dean, protective and irrationally angry, is ready to lash out.

"You don't." Pushing himself to his feet, Castiel ignores Dean's rising alarm and grabs his boots from beside his bed, picking up the duffel bag and setting it down on the patterned chartreuse and tan bedspread. Drawing out his jeans and his favorite shirt, Castiel folds them over his arm and turns to the bathroom door.

Dean is blocking his path, and even Sam has shifted to his feet behind him. Bracketed by two looming Winchesters, Castiel grimaces. He wishes, not for the first time, that he could simply transport himself away.

(His wings don't obey. They never will again. There is nothing to pain him, but his battered mind refuses to accept it as once again he reaches for something he can never have again.)

Gritting his teeth, Castiel takes a step sideways to move around him, and with all of the maturity of a child Dean steps smoothly in front of Cas again. For once, for _once_ , Cas isn't going to be able to just decide when a conversation ends with him. "No. I don't care if some bitch got into your head and made you feel guilty, Cas. . . "

"Dean." The response is clipped, forbidding, layered in meaning and dismissal, pointing out the obvious. He hasn't _assumed_ guilt. He is _guilty_.

"Cas, we are putting our necks on the block for you . . ."

Castiel turns his head, casting a glare up at Sam that is unfazed by their height difference or his current lack of angelic abilities. "I am aware. You will both die because of me. I can hear them, I know her intent. You can't hope to hide me for the rest of your life, or mine. I brought this upon myself."

Sam doesn't flinch. Dean doesn't move. Cas doesn't relent. The silence is smothering.

"Are you intending to try and keep me a prisoner?"

"No, Cas, no one's saying that." Sam says, hands out in a placating motion, at the same moment Dean unequivocally declares "You're damn right we will."

From the glares they cast at each other, both of them seem to think the other needs to get with the script.

By the time Castiel turns back to the elder Winchester, Dean has crowded closer. It would be imposing, intimidating even, had Castiel ever managed to establish a concept of personal space when it came to this man. The intention is unimportant, his desired effect fails, and Castiel meets his eyes boldly. "You're not going anywhere, Cas. This is bullshit. You _kicked my ribs in_ when I tried to bail to 'spare you all,' when Michael was trying to ride my ass. Don't make me return the favor."

It's all they've been doing, running. He has insinuated himself into their lives again and made these men quarry in the hunt for him. It is selfish, irresponsible, and the accusations laid against him are too fresh in his mind to ignore _why_ he came to them in the first place. He knows Dean means it, that he'll resort to violent measures if he has to, and he knows Dean has done no less to his own brother to save him. It only serves to underscore how he's used them. A 'disease,' Hester called Dean, but Castiel knows the truth of it: if anyone is the ruiner, the destroyer, it is him.

Over Castiel's head, Sam and Dean exchange worried looks as the angel falls silent, head bowed, seeming to draw in on himself. The Winchester boys have seen Castiel cut and bleeding, have seen him defiant and seen him resigned, seen him take the road of good intentions right to the heart of hell and madness, but Dean has only ever seen him _broken_ by Heaven. Heaven had him in its grip for a _day_ at most on the night he went to receive warning from Cas and found Jimmy Novak and signs of Castiel's fight, but their 'Bible Camp' had turned him all around and made him _afraid_ to help them, afraid to be anything but Heaven's tin soldier. Now he’s getting a pretty damned good look at how they keep those soldiers in line. . . and all he's witnessed is the physical after-effects, an echo of what had been happening in Cas's head.

Castiel had dive-bombed Hell twice for them and pulled through intact, but half an hour overpowered in Heaven and he’s a wreck.

Grasping Castiel's shoulder Dean ducks his head down, trying to catch his gaze, voice low. "What the hell do they _do_ to you up there?" He doesn't expect an answer. He doesn't get one.

"Tell me what I should do, Dean. Just tell me what to do?" It's a broken soldier's prayer for orders, the same words he has offered to his Father again and again without answer, the same plea he's given Dean in the past after being re-indoctrinated, while they were standing in Zachariah's greenroom before he blanched at the idea of breaking ranks.

_You spineless, soulless son of a bitch._

Dean knows Cas better than that now.

Some psycho angel bitch and all the choirs of Heaven might have gotten into his head and made him want to fall on his own sword for all his past sins, but Dean isn't letting him go that easily. Shifting his grip, Dean wraps his arm around Castiel's shoulders and tugs him close, not pulling away this time when Cas seems to fold into the hug. "You stick with us and you give me time to work on this, Cas. We stop with this motel crap and start doing the full Fort Knox every night, even if we have to squat somewhere new every couple of days to keep ahead of them. You're our expert on this, Cas. I need you to start thinking of every way you can to keep Hester and Heaven out of your head, every sigil, spell, ward, charm, whatever it takes."

Raising his chin from Castiel's shoulder, Dean catches Sam's eye where his brother has tactfully retreated a few steps, sitting back down on the other bed and allowing Dean to speak for them. His words are a mandate, an order, an answer to an unspoken question. He cannot, will not, lose this too. "We do _whatever it takes_."

 

* * *

 

Later, after Dean has given up all pretense of trying to sleep and folded the couch bed away, sitting in the dark room with the bottle of whiskey on his knee and his gaze on the indistinct shape of Castiel's fitfully tossing form curled beneath the blankets of his bed, Sam pads over to join him on the opposite end of the couch. Elbows across his knees, he leans forward and follows Dean's gaze.

"We gonna talk about this, Dean?" Sam keeps his voice low, his eyes fixed across the room. He doesn’t want to wake Cas, and he knows from long experience that Dean would rather turn his back and literally save face than have someone watching him through a personal discussion. It’s easier for his brother to open up when he’s not being stared at. Not that his brother is going to allow a personal discussion. Dean’s posture is rigid, and he manages to make a whisper forbidding.

"There's nothing _to_ talk about. We save him. We hunt down this next lead in Iowa and if it's a bust we follow the next one, and the next one, until we have the juice to back down Crowley and make this Hester bitch pay."

Dragging his palm down his jaw, Sam lets himself be redirected for the moment. "You toss that kind of power at Cas again, Dean, you don't know what's going to happen. Or that it'll fix anything."

"Still need to find it. After that, we'll figure it out." They fall silent again, but Sam doesn't move away and Dean doesn't break his guard-dog poise.

"You know I wasn't talking about the Grace, Dean." Sam begins after a moment, persistent. "I was talking about you and Cas. . ."

"Yeah, I know what you were talking about. But _I'm_ not talking about it." Taking a swig of the whiskey, Dean savors the familiar burn of it, his murmur growing more hoarse. "Take the damn hint, Sammy."

After a beat Sam shows his palms in surrender, before rising from the couch and slipping back away silently, leaving Dean to his vigil.


	10. Chapter 10

"Do we _really_ need to do this, Dean?"

"Yes! Now quit stalling, Sam."

"Fine. Okay. I'll play along. Let's go."

". . . Damnit!"

"I don't understand." Castiel watches the brothers with obvious confusion as he tucks his lock picks into his jacket again after the painfully slow entry to the abandoned home, his first lesson in "B&E 101." His voice is serious, contemplative, and he looks between the Winchesters as if attempting to understand a complex negotiation, still attempting to wrap his mind around the rules as they had been explained to him. " . . . Why would paper beat rock?"

"Because paper _always_ does. It doesn’t matter though. . . because Dean _always_ throws scissors." Sam mutters, casting a too-shrewd look at his brother before shouldering his bag and continuing on his way to the small downstairs bedroom with its musty mattress, the apparent prize of the competition. Some part of Castiel feels guilty that he's glad Dean has lost, that he will be stuck sharing the living room with him. His own sleeping arrangement had been predetermined: Castiel assumed it was because they felt one of them needed to keep an eye on him, in case their wards failed.

"Bitch!" Dean calls after his brother, receiving an eye roll rather than the customary rejoinder in response. This has an air of routine, all of it, but there is something off about it too. Perhaps if he just understood. . .

"But if you always throw scissors, then wouldn't he be able to anticipate and know to throw rock, as he did? Doesn’t that make the results a foregone conclusion . . ."

"Forget about the game, Cas." Dean commands, dumping his duffle bag onto the living room floor and eyeing the area with determination, an instant dismissal of the other topic. There isn't much to see. The top floor of the house shows obvious storm damage, a sizeable tree partially uprooted and canted into the upper floor. Signs of a tornado still linger, a line of damage through the surrounding acreage, but the weeds have begun to grow through the path, the storm long gone. Someone had come through and cleared out much of the furniture and all of the belongings, but a few things still remain. The mattress, soaked by the storm and left to dry out (or mildew) for months, and a sagging couch in the same condition.

Dean eyes the couch and drags the cushions off it, tossing them onto the floor and throwing his camp roll down as well before turning and looking at Cas. "You gonna stand there and watch me all day, Cas, or you gonna get to work? I don't know about you but every time I try writing bizarre ancient languages at night in the dark, my handwriting . . ."

Castiel shakes his head slightly, pulling himself out of his thoughts and spurring himself into action, silent as he paces the walls. He judges the points of the compass based on the slant of the early evening sun through the windows, and draws the stub of chalk out of his jacket pocket. Suddenly conscious of Dean's eyes on his back, Castiel stills and turns to meet his stare, stopping himself before he can begin the glyphs and sigils.

"I'm gonna go see if I can't get us some power." Dean remarks unnecessarily, and Castiel has the impression that had he not turned, Dean would still be standing there watching him despite chastising Cas for doing the same thing.

Minutes later, Sam slips out of the back bedroom, shrugging into his suit jacket, his hair tamed and tie loose around his neck, waiting for him to button his collar. He halts in his steps when he sees Castiel watching him, and Cas can see him reaching for a ready lie to explain the attire.

Turning, he redirects his attention to the wall instead and Sam's excuse dies on his lips as Cas begins shaping patterns with the chalk. Frowning, Sam watches him a moment, before he finishes his trek out of the house, leaning against the wall next to Dean. "You ever get the feeling Cas knows more than he's letting on?"

"All the damn time. Guy's been around awhile." Running his wrist over his forehead to keep the sweat and grime out of his eyes, Dean squints at his brother suspiciously. "Why?"

Sam shrugs, pulling a face. "It's nothing." Holding his hand out, he shakes the feeling off. "Keys."

Dean drops the keys into his brother's hand, giving the house up as a lost cause. "Flashlights and camp lanterns. This place is fried."

"I'll call if I find anything."

"Call either way. And take care of my baby."

"Goes without saying. You sure you don't want to do the legwork?" Dean narrows his eyes at his brother, looking for a hidden commentary and sure he's missing one, with how innocent Sam looks. “I mean, I don’t want you to start feeling cooped up babysitting Cas _every time_. . . just doesn’t seem fair, right?” Raising his hands, Sam rests his fist atop his open palm, and now Dean _knows_ he's screwing with him, a smirk curling up the corner of Sam’s lips and a smug amusement in his hazel eyes. "Rock, paper, scissors? Best out of three?"

His little brother is _trolling_ him, calling him out on the farce of a game that decided their sleeping arrangements. Dean rubs a grimy hand to the back of his neck and tries to ignore the implications of that, eventually settling on gruff and dismissive. "Go." Waving his brother away, Dean busies himself with picking up his tools. "You're burning daylight, and you've got a drive to get there and back."

"It's an astronomy professor, Dean. It's not like he's holding typical office hours." Sam laughs, and jingling the keys in his hand he makes his way across the gravel and weed strewn yard to the Impala. Dean watches him until he's driven past the waist-high weeds, until the car disappears through the copse of twisting oaks and is gone.

Glancing at his phone, Dean notes the time the same way he always has any time he lets his brother out of his sight, making a mental note of when exactly he should start worrying if he hasn't heard back and ensuring his phone is charged and ready if he's called for help. Old habits are a comfort in their way. Particularly when everything else is up in the air.

Castiel's still writing on the walls when Dean slips inside, silent and tense enough that each sharp motion, each violent drag of the chalk along the wall, probably hurts. Cas doesn't look like a man decorating a house, he looks like a man cutting his way through enemies one slash of chalk at a time. Dean shoves his hands into his pockets as he approaches, resisting the urge to lay a hand on Castiel's shoulder as he stands back to watch.

"I'm almost done." Castiel breaks the silence, addressing the wall before him, a series of lines that twist and bend and intersect, a complex geometric pattern interspersed with Enochian symbols that Dean recognizes, though to him they have no meaning. They crawl around the outer walls, squares and pentagrams and circles hashed with straight lines, binding together and confining the symbols that Dean's come to recognize as the angelic language that Castiel branded into their ribs, painted onto Bobby's windows in his blood. This, though, it's like nothing Castiel's put together before for them.

"This looks. . ."

"Demonic." Castiel confirms with a twist of disgust to his lips, and suddenly Dean recognizes the patterns. Alastair's handiwork at the morgue, keeping the angels away to allow him to kill the reapers. Crowley's mansion, inlaid into the walls themselves. "Profane." There is _power_ in this, beyond the reach of even the most powerful of angels in those angular lines and the binding shapes, power to ward away the armies of hell with each twisting angelic sigil that Castiel brings into it. . . but there is cost, too. Castiel sweeps the chalk along the walls with the air of a man slitting his own wrists. Hell, Dean's _seen_ Castiel cut himself up with less expression. The way Cas talked about the Enochian he'd painted up in his blood it sounded like a prayer, which made sense for Cas and his fellow angels no matter how dickish they are. Dean doesn't imagine the elite of Hell put up much in the way of prayers, though. And the last person to bring the angelic language into Hell, to adapt and modify and twist and contain it in this way and teach it to all the good little demons, was also the last person to split Heaven in war. "Blasphemous."

With a flick of his wrist, Castiel draws his knife and slashes it deeply across the inside of his arm beneath his rolled-up shirtsleeves, pressing his hand to the welling blood before raising it to the wall. He hesitates, eyes closed, lips drawn back into a grimace, the muscles in his neck visibly corded, and when he presses his hand into the wall it's the movement of a man walking up to the gallows and tying the noose himself.

The handprint he leaves behind is a signature in scarlet, Heaven's once obedient soldier signing off on something he can barely force himself to look at. Dean knows the shape of that hand, the length of each of those fingers, the spaces between. He doesn't pretend to know what it means to Cas, though, to leave it here.

The man is completely willing to go serve himself up for execution, but Dean has handed him the task of protecting not just himself but both Winchesters while they sleep. He gave Cas the responsibility of protecting everything he has left in the world, and as Dean’s guardian angel he has once again forced himself well outside of his personal boundaries to do just that.

Turning on his heel Castiel brushes past Dean on his way towards the front door, leaving Dean staring at that bloody handprint among the chalk. He hears the angel pause there, can picture him with his bowed head and closed eyes even without turning to face him, and he anticipates what Cas is thinking before he says it.

"' _Whatever it takes.'"_

His footsteps are loud on the porch and the wood sighs beneath his weight as the angel drops himself heavily onto the step.

Dean gives him a moment to pray this time, before he joins him.

Settling onto the step beside Castiel, shoulder to shoulder looking out over the peaceful Iowa field, Dean follows the line the storm took with his eyes, the shallow tear in the earth that is slowly healing itself, felled and broken branches in the bramble of trees in the distance. Weeds and rain and wind will do their work, and eventually you won't even be able to tell it had happened at all. Beside him Castiel's hands hang loosely between his knees, elbows braced on his thighs, feet resting on the bottom step and eyes closed. He registers Dean's presence beside him, though, a line of parallel points, shoulder to hip and hip to knee and boots nearly touching, where the narrow step isn't enough distance for him not to feel Dean's warmth.

"Cas."

He can feel Dean's voice in his bones, he thinks, and he hates himself for how he needs that and for how he flinches at his own name, the nickname they laid against him like evidence.

"Cas, you're _nothing_ like Lucifer. I've met Lucifer, trust me, you ain't him."

It's such a hollow line. Dean jumps right to the chase without preamble as if simply by declaring it so that he can make it true, and Castiel can't help shaking his head slightly and opening his mouth to respond. Dean takes the reaction as encouragement, as a sign that Castiel's listening. He plows on, his voice gaining confidence, demanding attention. "You're not God either, and I think you knew that even while you tried to fill his shoes. Truth is, Cas, you never had a chance, for the same reason I know for damn sure you're not like Lucifer. You _care_ too much to be either of those assholes."

Only Dean would think the best way to comfort someone who committed blasphemy for him was to call God an uncaring asshole. He must notice something change in Castiel's posture, because Cas can feel Dean's gaze shift off the horizon, and he catches the glint of green in his peripheral as he opens his own eyes and looks out towards the faint stain of sunset caught behind clouds on the horizon.

Dean's hand on his bare forearm is a surprise, but he doesn't pull away as Dean draws his arm out, his hand curled behind Castiel's own blood-stained fingers to keep them in place as he examines the new cut along his arm, fingers of his other hand laying more of the medical gauze that Castiel is beginning to hate along his skin. It seems to give him something else to focus on, makes the words easier, and Castiel tries not to let the action mean more than that as his hand is cradled in Dean's, resting on Dean's knee.

"You should have heard some of the voicemails I left _my_ father, when he disappeared on me. Some of the things Sam said when they fought. Hell, some of what _I_ said. I was pissed, and he was. . ." Shaking his head slightly, Dean seems to be forcing the words out now, and he pauses in his examination. "My father wasn't there for me, most of the times I needed it. I get what he was doing. . . But it wasn't enough for him, and I had to take care of a lot of things. Be the good son, the good soldier. I fucked things up more often than I got them right, but. . ." Shrugging, Dean's fingers twitch against the back of Castiel's hand, and he resists the urge to turn his palm in Dean's, interlock their fingers and offer unwanted comfort for an old injury that has been left to scar. "Thing is, no matter the shit we said to each other, all three of us, he knew we loved him. And I figure if John Winchester was bright enough to figure that out, to read between the lines, we gotta assume that God is too."

"So, I won't claim I get it. . . I'm not the most religious guy, you _know_ that. My experience, God's just another deadbeat dad, Heaven's a holodeck stuck on reruns, angels are all egotistical dicks of some kind or another, present company no longer excluded. . ." Ducking his head, Castiel gives a quiet, staid puff of humorless laughter and misses Dean's faint smirk that blooms with it, but dies slowly on his face as he continues. ". . . And in the end, I've still spent more time in _Hell_ than I have on earth." It's a disturbing thought to both of them, falling into the conversation like a stone that somehow seems to settle in Castiel's stomach. The admission adds the rough edge of pain to Dean's voice, and for the first time since he started speaking Castiel wishes he would stop, wants him to go on, wants to understand. "There are times Hell still feels more real than anything up here. Hard to know what to believe in."

Dean's fingers slot into place between Castiel's, weather-beaten, tanned, knuckles scraped from his work or the fight at Bobby's or from any of the multitude of fights before that Castiel had never witnessed or been there to heal him from, that have laced the creases with fine white scars. Castiel can feel the calluses and flaws of Dean's palm against the back of his hand as he squeezes Cas's own to draw his attention. He waits until Castiel's wide unblinking stare shifts from his bloodstained and chalk-dusted palm and Dean's battered fingers interlocked, up to Dean's face.

"But I believe in _you_ , Cas."

And whether or not Castiel thinks it of himself any longer, Dean firmly believes that he too deserves to be saved.

It's a tense moment, a charged one, and Dean's been a con man and a ladies' man long enough to know when he's got someone hooked. He doesn't need _Sam_ to point out what's going on—the kid might be book-smart, but even with the obvious confusing qualities this is still more Dean's area. But Castiel's still struggling with it all, the strangest combination of world-weary and born-yesterday, hunted and drowning in his own guilt, and Dean's his one reliable anchor right now. . . and he's his own bucket of issues that they really shouldn't crack.

They’re volatile chemicals in combination just waiting for the right catalyst, and Dean can’t look at what’s between them without thinking he would come out the other side fundamentally _changed_ by his own reactions _._ He’s not ready for that. He used to think he never would be. Now, with the edge of vulnerability in Cas’s stare, he’s not as sure. His instinct is to trivialize the intimacy of this moment, to shove it away in a box with humor, but he can’t do that to Cas right now.

Dean's not going to turn what he just said into another line, a 'last night on earth' or a 'carpe diem’ or a platitude.

He breaks the moment by turning away, rapping his knuckles against Cas's knee and drawing the angel to his feet with their linked hands before pulling his away. "Come on." His voice is gruff again, and he tucks his hands into his jacket pockets to restrain them as he sets off through the gravel and weeds. "Old Winchester coping method, while we've still got some sunlight left. Bring the chalk."

He doesn't have to look back to see the confusion on Castiel's face.

He's dealing with enough of his own.

 

* * *

 

"Pretty sure this is it, Dean."

Finger plugged into his ear, cell phone pressed against the other Dean steps back from where he'd been directing the gun-toting angel with a hand on his elbow, as shots ring out in the open field with the sharp ding of their metal target being perforated in rapid procession making it hard to pick out his brother's words right away.

"What?"

"The Grace. That hit from Iowa Central Community College, it pans out. Professor here was having a stargazing party the night Cas fell." Casting a quick look at Castiel as the gunfire falls silent, he gives a noncommittal grunt of understanding for his brother before addressing the inquisitive gaze fixed on him. "It's Sam, he may have a hunt for us. Why don't you go take a look? I'll be right there."

Either Dean is getting worse at lying, or Castiel is just good at seeing through him: disbelief steals over the fallen angel's face in the moment before he turns away, and Dean winces to see it. He doesn't stop Castiel's progress to the wind-torn remnants of a tin shed and the concentric circles they'd chalked into the corrugated side, though. Turning away, Dean lets out a low breath and nods though his brother can't see it.

"Okay. Tell me."

"Professor Sinestra's got the date and time recorded, called it in to the usual stargazer societies. . . a group of about ten students outside of Fort Dodge witnessed a pretty spectacular meteor event to the western horizon about the time Cas crash landed."

"That's about . . . what, two hundred miles from Sioux Falls? That track with Anna?"

"This isn't a precise science, Dean. I'm not sure the events compare. Anna's wasn't taking a body along for the ride. And anyway, it's not as wide an area as between where she ended up in Ohio and where we found the tree in Kentucky."

"Good enough for me, then. What else you got?"

"Well, I'm digging into the area now. I'll grab the papers, hit the library, and see if we can dig up anything unexplained out where it might have landed."

"Start looking for miracles." Dean orders, and behind him he hears a rustle of movement in the grass. Squinting his eyes shut, Dean lets his breath out slowly and speaks as much for his brother's benefit as his own. "Son of a . . ."

"Dean?" Sam's voice over the line is ignored as Dean turns, cellphone still trapped against his cheek.

Castiel is perhaps two feet away as if he'd simply arrived out of thin air the way he always used to, expression blanked and grip on his gun loose. He speaks only once Dean has turned to him, the gravel in his voice and pain in his eyes confirmation enough that he'd heard even before his words. "Miracles. Anna. Sioux Falls."

"Cas. . ."

Sam swears quietly over the line, catching on, and Dean ignores him as he drops his hands to his sides, still holding the phone.

"No." No more lies. No explanations. No attempting to plead with him or to sway him. Not after everything he's gone through to get this shot at redeeming himself in the eyes of the people who matter the most to him, only to find out that they've been planning to send him right back. Holstering the pistol Castiel sets off in stiff strides, crossing through the track of the tornado towards the abandoned house.

"Son of a _bitch_." Dean repeats into the open phone line a moment later, and Sam rumbles his agreement though he doesn't know the half of it from Dean's perspective.

"Want me to pack it up, head back. . .?"

"No. Keep digging. I'll talk to Cas." Turning in place Dean scrubs a hand over his jaw, already trying to put together something to say, as his eye alight on the tin 'target' and the cluster of X-marked bullet holes that had been Dean's demonstration, peppered now with Castiel's own attempt. Only three are far off mark as Cas learned to sight, and the rest crowd amongst and around Dean's.

"We need him, Dean."

"Yeah, I know."

 _That_ much is clear either way.


	11. Chapter 11

Though he knows that they're removed enough from civilization that Cas can't have hitched a ride, that he wasn't far enough behind the retreating angel that he'd have missed the sudden arrival of Heaven or Hell's hitmen, there's still a momentary sense of panic when Dean opens the door into the abandoned home and Castiel's not there. The living room is dim and empty, and he can only just make out the twisting sigils and glyphs that seem more foreboding now that he understands what they mean to their author. Making his way in the dying light to the duffle bag on the floor, he digs out the camp lantern and flicks it on, a humming yellow light that he balances on the run-down cushionless couch as he confirms for himself that Cas isn't there to be found.

The old wooden house seems to groan, a dying old dame revealing her secrets as the final sliver of sun sinks below the horizon, and Dean's eyes are drawn to the ceiling, then the stairs. The deep sense of unease increases. It's too quiet, and quiet is regularly a prelude to horrors in Dean's life.

Leaving the camp light to illuminate the downstairs, Dean draws his flashlight from the bag and his gun from his holster, bracing his wrists together. The beam of light and muzzle of the gun sweep together as he begins his climb, clearing halls and rooms with the ease of a seasoned police officer and the silence of a hunter.

He finds Castiel alone in the furthest upstairs room. The flashlight shines over twisting branches, their stark shadows like barbed wire in the tight and crowded confines of the room, over the broken boards of wood and shattered drywall and on to the angel standing amongst the fallen branches, looking out through the hole torn through the side of the home toward the stars beginning to show in the night sky.

For a moment Dean thinks Castiel must be praying again, but as the light settles upon him he turns his head. In the harsh halogen of the flashlight, Castiel's red rimmed eyes are startlingly blue, the bruise still along his jaw is yellow and brown obscured by the thin sheen of dark stubble that had grown in since Castiel's grooming experiment, and his skin seems luminous; a fragile translucent cover over a creature once made of light.

Face a mask and pupils contracted to pinpricks in the light as the breeze through the broken wall ruffles his hair, Castiel flicks his gaze from Dean's face to the gun in his hands and back again, but his posture and poise don't change as Dean lowers gun and flashlight both.

"Cas. . . you scared the hell out of me."

Somewhere between the tin shed and the living room, Dean should have constructed some sort of explanation or speech or heartfelt apology, or a fight-inducing insult that would have fixed this. Should have. Didn't. Dean isn't a planned speeches kind of person and every so often he regrets the fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants mentality he usually finds exhilarating.

With Castiel staring at him without expression, he wishes he had some ready-made words to reach for. He fumbles for them after a moment, trying to keep his voice light, grabbing at the first coherent distraction he can.

"Think we could make a pretty decent hunter out of you with a few months practice. Bit too good with a blade for your own health, steady hand. . . proved you could hit the broadside of a barn at least." Castiel doesn't crack a smile, not even the hint of it that Dean has begun looking for in all their interactions. Tough room. "Even managed a pretty decent bluff back at Bobby's. Figure if we work at it you could learn how to take an identity without blowing it . . ."

"Dean." Castiel manages to make his name a command that clicks his teeth together, silencing him. This is the voice that had once reminded him that he could cast him back into hell easily, that he should show some respect. It’s somehow all the more frightening for its level, quiet promise of violence. "Stop talking."

Turning to face Dean fully now, Castiel remains among the broken tree branches, framed in the deepening night sky and lit as the whole room is from below, where Dean's lowered flashlight pools light on the broken tiles. It makes his eyes fathomless and black and creates shadows in the tight creases around Castiel’s eyes. "You've talked. I've listened. Now, _you_ listen. There will be no months of practice, no hunts. You're planning to destroy me."

Dean shakes his head, the denial quick to his lips, but Castiel continues speaking undeterred. "I have given _everything_ to get here, Dean. Everything. I made a _choice_ , and you and Sam have been plotting behind my back, expecting me not to notice, expecting I would concede to your will like a child, like a _pet_. . ." Something dark and ugly and dangerous creeps into the word, spat at Dean with barely contained fury and pain. Hester's taunts confirmed for him. "We tore everything apart for free will, and _mine_ means nothing to you."

"Cas. . ."

Castiel crosses the room with a speed and grace that should be beyond him, through the broken branches and to Dean. Cas’s gauze-taped forearm hits him across his shoulders, slamming him back against the far wall of the room next to the door to the hall as Castiel's other hand snatches his wrist and smashes it against the doorframe to loosen his grasp. The gun hits the tile with a clatter that seems louder for Castiel's harsh whisper: Dean hadn't even thought to raise it.

" _No_. You warned me not to take on that power, and you were _right_. I killed hundreds of _people_ , Dean. Not good people, but _people_. I murdered scores of my family, I twisted the sword and destroyed the very few of my brothers and sisters that loved me enough to try to stand against me, and I started a war of a scope you cannot _conceive_." Castiel's pressed against him, pinning Dean to the wall with his body and his words and his pain filled eyes. Part of Dean knows he could escape this. A sharp blow with the metal barrel of the flashlight to the half-healed wound in Castiel's side where his free hand could easily strike it, he could use all of the wounds he knows Castiel has picked up in his short time as a human to break free. This isn’t the alleyway, and however harsh and alien Castiel appears in his rage he’s essentially human now. The moment Dean does that, though, they cannot come back from it. "I came to you because I _trusted_ you. Because you were _right_ about me. And now you want me to take it all back."

"You’d rather Crowley took that power? Hester?" Dean snaps out sharply, angered by Castiel's readiness to believe the worst. "Listen to me, I'm _not_ trying to God you back up, Cas!"

Shaking his head, eyes narrowed, Castiel doesn't ease up the pressure on Dean. "No. It's bound with my Grace, it would be useless to Hester and Crowley couldn't touch it. It's better if I stay away and let it fade with me."

"How sure of that _are_ you, Cas?" Dean persists, seeing the spark of doubt alight in his eyes. "Sure enough to risk that much power going to either of them?"

"You'd rather risk me with that power again? Dean, you _saw_. . ." And he does see. Quite suddenly, Dean understands what’s behind the pain, and the anger, and the guilt. Castiel is _afraid_. Afraid of what he had become and afraid that Dean is asking it of him again. Afraid of how much farther he can fall.

"No!" Dean brings his hand up, inserting it between Castiel's forearm and his shoulder and shoving, and Cas allows it, arm slackening and dropping to his side as he takes a wary step back. "Damn it, Cas, I told you. . . I'm _not_ trying to put that back on you. We've got to find it, but. . . the Grace, I saw it when Uriel had Anna's, he'd corked it. We do that and they can't risk coming after us. Mutually assured destruction."

Not the best of terms to use, perhaps.

Castiel watches him in silence, still braced for a fight and breathing heavily, but he steps back as Dean tries to grasp his shoulder, refusing the comforting touch and the words that would go with them. " _I_ become the threat, then. The potential weapon. I carry that for the rest of my life." That much he can almost accept. He is always going to carry the weight of it with him. But there is more, the unspoken Catch-22 that will always prove their undoing. "But it wouldn't be. Something would happen to you, or to Sam, and I would yield to the temptation. Something would happen to me. . ."

And _Dean_ would open that bottle. Let the genie back out. They all make deals, they do whatever reckless thing they have to do to keep each other alive, and it will _always_ be a temptation. After all. . . hadn't 'whatever it takes' to protect each other been how they'd gotten into the mess in the first place? And then they would have the power of a  _god_  at their disposal, if they became reckless.

Dean doesn't have an answer.

"We cross that bridge when we get there, Cas. We've got to handle it first, got to get to it."

After an agonizing silence Castiel looks away, face enshadowed, and Dean can see the fight leave him. This isn't agreement, its resignation. "We're getting closer. I can feel it."

Well that would have been handy to know before Wisconsin, but they'd been keeping their plans from him. "Anna only knew once we reached the tree," Dean supplies dumbly into the darkened room, and catches the faint reflective glint of Castiel's eyes turned back to him and the pointed silence.

If he senses the Grace from a few solid hours of driving away, then. . .

The implication settles in: if Cas's angelic Geiger counter pings from this far away, there’s a _lot_ more to sense. "Oh."

Castiel seems to gather himself, letting his breath out slowly and straightening his shoulders before he bends to pick the fallen gun up off the floor, offering it to Dean without looking at him. Mutely, Dean holsters the weapon and raises the flashlight again, taking the lead in leaving the storm-damaged room, flicking off the flashlight once the warm yellow glow of the camp lantern begins to pool over them. It’s only then that he realizes Castiel has stopped keeping pace behind him.

The fallen angel looks nauseated, eyes closed to block out the chalk lines and bloodied handprint. Looking from Cas to the room around him, Dean frowns slightly. "This protect the whole house?"

"Yes." Even with his eyes closed Castiel sounds faintly irritated, as if Dean has asked something that should be blatantly obvious to him. Castiel wouldn’t stoop to blasphemy and leave it with the opportunity still to fail them.

Coming to a quick decision, Dean paces over to Castiel and takes him by the wrist, leading him through the living room and beyond it to the room Sam won in the pretense of a game. He snatches up Sam’s bag, ignoring Castiel's questioning eyes as he hands him the flashlight. "Hold that."

Slipping out of the room again, following the light of the living room, he draws his phone out of his pocket and dials, dumping Sam’s bag beside the camp roll he laid out earlier.

"We're taking your room." He tells his brother as he hears the line pick up, and for a second he wonders if Sam heard him, though he can hear the rumble of his baby in the background and knows his brother is driving.

". . . That was fast. I was going to ask how it went with Cas, but I guess that answers _that_. . . "

Pinching the bridge of his nose, thumb and knuckle pressed to his eyelids, Dean mutters under his breath for a moment before speaking to his brother again. "No, dumbass. The wards, they're bothering him."

“Uh-huh.” Sam's agreement sounds placating and amused, having missed what his brother had witnessed, but his follow up is genuine. "He okay?"

"Loose sense of the term, yeah. Sure. You find anything?"

"Yeah. Place called. . ."

"Tell me when you get here. Cas can feel it, we'll head out in the morning."

Wrapping the short conversation without answering further questions, conscious of the angel listening to the conversation echo through the empty house, Dean shoulders their bags and hauls them back to the bedroom, dumping them unceremoniously in the corner. Castiel has taken a seat, perched on the edge of the mattress on the floor with his legs drawn out of the pathway and elbows across his knees again, still holding the flashlight loosely. He looks up as Dean enters, seeming to weigh his words before deciding on simplicity and absolute sincerity.

"Thank you."

If Dean hadn't figured out how much staying in the living room would have bothered him by then, it would have been absolute confirmation. Dean shrugs it away and moves to the opposite end of the mattress, unlacing his boots and tucking them into the corner as well. "Thank me by not snoring so loud."

Before Castiel has time to contemplate the comment or the action or the fact that he has been volunteered to share a bed, Dean flings himself facedown, fully clothed save for his shoes and socks, onto his side of the mattress.

. . . It has been a very emotionally confusing day.


	12. Chapter 12

Castiel is falling, falling, and the ground is far away still. His bones are splintering, tendons and muscles fraying, ripping. His wings trail uselessly through the air behind him, the tail on the kite in the blue sky of his favorite Heaven. He is ripping away at the fabric of his being, ensuring he will never see that heaven again, tearing his Grace which clings to him, beautiful and powerful and poisonous light. It is toxic, he is toxic, and it’s killing him and it is the spark of him that is life, and everything is spiraling blue and green, sky and ground both turning dark, one rushing up to meet him and one watching impassively as he leaves it behind. In the last moments he spreads his wings; they shatter and burn. . . too late.

The ground surges forward hungrily to swallow him, green and sunlit gold grass, and Castiel wakes with a start, fighting against the restraining earth.

"Cas! Cas, it's me! It's just me."

The voice against the top of his head is familiar, rough with sleep and concern. Dean's heart races against his cheek, and the arms wrapped around him are something between restraint and an embrace, fingers threaded through his hair and a vice-like grip trapping him. Slowly, Castiel remembers.

He had stared at the ceiling above him, floating somewhere between wishing for sleep and complete awareness of the warmth on the other side of the bed. He stayed up listening to Dean's slow breathing with a sense of fascination and fear, breathing in the smell of mildewed mattress and Dean Winchester and grass and earth and gunpowder. He wanted to sleep. Wanted to curl into Dean and feel his arm around him. Wanted to stay awake and listen. Wanted to resent Dean for how easy it was for him.

It wasn't, of course, easy for Dean—Castiel is a distraction and it's too early for sleep for a man used to collapsing into bed at 2AM after a night hunting. Sleep was just a convenient excuse. The mattress smelled like his father's musty old sleeping bag tucked over them, curled up with little Sammy in the back seat of the Impala on the side of a road between Kansas and everywhere with the night stars through the back window and the best sleep he ever expected in his nomadic young life because Sam and his Dad were _there,_ with him, and his Mom was watching over him from Heaven above. Eventually sleep overtook him as he drifted in those half-formed memories.

Then Castiel made a strangled sound between pain and fear and he'd woken up terrified that despite the sigils it had happened again on his watch.

Beneath his hand, palm spread along Castiel's back, he can feel the angel's muscles jump and tremor, caught in the aftermath. Instinctively he attempts to soothe Cas, rubbing slow circles until he feels Castiel catch his breath and slowly go stiff in his grasp until he's a statue once again.

"I'm fine."

Tense son of a bitch sometimes, Castiel.

"Yeah, you _seem_ fine." Dean agrees sarcastically against the top of his head. When he loosens his arm around Cas, he’s unsurprised but regretful when Castiel pulls away entirely and perches on the edge of the mattress again. This is what Dean is coming to recognize as Castiel's default poise; half slouched, feet planted, hands loose and head bowed. In the dark, he is a hunched shadow on the edge of the bed, breathing with the sort of metronome steadiness that only deliberate concentration on the action brings. "You wanna tell me what that was?"

"No." Castiel intones flatly, and Dean has a surge of unexpected sympathy for Sam, when Dean was trying to lie about his nightmares of Hell. Nightmares of hell, and Castiel watching him wake with that damned unnerving stare that said he saw right through you.

"Was it Hester? What she did?"

"No." Frustration leaks through this time and Cas raises his hand to card his fingers through his sleep-rumpled hair. Dean's fingers twitch in memory: he'd just done the same to that hair. "I have no wish to discuss. . ."

"Cas, you were practically shaking . . ."

"I am not _weak_." Castiel interrupts without turning, vehement and forceful. Dean's eyes narrow, trying to make Castiel out more clearly as he sits up further, braced on his elbows.

"Nobody said you were." Silence greets him, and Dean finds himself not for the first time annoyed by Castiel's tendency to shut down a conversation. Hypocritical? Maybe. But damned if he doesn't always find it annoying when someone plays his game better than he does. Even since he started showing he _could_ display emotions, Castiel has proven difficult to read, particularly without the faint facial clues that Dean knows to look for. In frustration, Dean half rolls off the bed, grabbing the flashlight and turning it on, balancing it on the end of its barrel to act as a temporary lamp and a sign of his refusal to drop the subject. "In fact, I figure anything that can do that to _you_ has got to be pretty damned bad. But you're only human, Cas. . ."

The second he says the words Dean wants to snatch them back, an uncomfortable reminder of the fact that Castiel had been anything but 'only human' for millennia. For a moment Castiel seems to weigh the phrase, staring distantly at the far wall until he comes to some conclusion and nods. As Dean shifts to put his back against the wall and stretch his legs across the mattress, Cas half turns to face the hunter. The familiar blue eyes are red-rimmed, deepset, and somber. "Yes. I am."

The matter-of-fact words are laced with possible meaning, too many interpretations to count, and Dean watches emotions flit across Castiel's face, half formed and heartbreaking for how damned raw it all is. How new. "Look, Cas, you . . ."

"I was falling."

His words are clipped not with his usual taciturn nature but with pain, and Dean moves over on the bed in invitation. After a brief hesitation, Castiel joins him as if he's waiting to be told he's doing it wrong, the entire humanity aspect. He fixes his eyes on Dean's bare feet, his own digging into the mattress as he half draws them to him, resuming his typical posture now shoulder-to-shoulder with Dean.

"It was a nightmare, Cas. Just a nightmare."

"No. It was a memory." Castiel corrects, resting his head back against the wall and tearing his eyes away from that one small vulnerability, Dean rubbing the toes of one foot against the bottom of the other as if to warm them with friction or ease an itch. It’s a very _human_ gesture, entirely forgettable and somehow fascinating coming from Dean. He looks at the light on the ceiling, instead, the faint impressions of circles of luminescence from reflectors, contacts, lens, lamp; more complex than it seemed at first glance, that area of light. Castiel studies it, rather than risk looking at his companion again.

After a long moment Dean nods slightly, watching Castiel stare intently at the ceiling, accepting the distinction. "Yeah. I can get that." And for the moment, that's it. Castiel has said all he intends to and while Dean's curiosity has been piqued he knows his own opinion of people trying to pry into his head. The only thing he can think of is to relate to it, to offer a connection. "I remember the smell of it."

Castiel's head shifts to look at him without moving away from the wall, his attention focusing on Dean. His eyes reflect the flashlight and Dean can see the faint tightening around them that is practically an interrogation, as clear as a spoken request for clarification, for continuance. "I don't know if you're supposed to be able to smell in a dream—I never really spent much time studying psychology outside of what you can learn at a poker table or in a con—but I swear I can smell it. Smoke and metal and blood. Mostly blood. I wake up and it's still there, and it's like I'm back in Hell." It's such a small piece of himself to offer, but he hasn't given it to Sam. Probably won't share it with anyone else. But Castiel had _been_ there. He'd seen it, and considering what Dean has just witnessed from the angel, it isn't as if Castiel will judge Dean for the memories that haunt him.

It's a long moment before Castiel nods, taking a breath and turning back to his original uptilted position, but this time his eyes are closed, lashes casting a fan of fine shadows that with his attention removed Dean feels free to examine. "My wings. I wake up, and I can still feel them tearing. Burning."

It's not something he's ever spent much time considering, those wings. Oh, they've crossed Dean's mind in an abstract sort of way whenever he'd gotten a glimpse of their shadow, or saw the charred impression of them around the broken bodies of angels that seemed to litter the last few years of their lives, but Castiel has always seemed so solidly, dependably himself. Rumpled trench coat and tie askew, sitting in the passenger's seat of the Impala or standing with a hand on Dean's shoulder. The idea of him losing his Grace. . . well, Sam had walked around without a soul for a year and Cas had been cut off from Heaven's power more than once. Dean is becoming inured to the idea of spiritual damage. The wings, though. . .

Dean remembers the razor cutting into his flesh, thirty years of pain and ten years of self-destruction, and he can relate to agony and loss of self far better than a man his age should be able to.

"It gets more distant. Never goes away, anyone who tells you that is bullshitting you, but it happens less often and you start getting where you can put it aside." This, he understands. He can relate and fall into the big brother role he’s more familiar with, offering advice from experience. In many ways, Castiel can look down on the wealth of experience a mere thirty years on Earth could offer, or even Dean's forty in Hell, but all the crap and damage and bad decisions and pain and head-case trauma of suffering and humanity. . . Cas is new to it. Dean is an _expert._ It’s a dubious distinction.

"It's still worth it, though." Dean offers into the stillness and the unoppressive silence between them after a moment, turning his head to take in Castiel's profile again. "I forget it sometimes, but it's true."

_You can take your peace, and shove it up your lily white ass. 'Cause I'll take the pain. And the guilt. I'll even take Sam as-is. It's better than being some Stepford Bitch in Paradise._

That’s _life_. And as fucked up as it can be some time, it’s _his_ , and he’ll keep on fighting to keep it.

"I know." Castiel assures quietly, in the low, hoarse voice that hides so much. For Dean, this is _it_. It’s what he was made for. Castiel _chose_ it. He chose a life of scrabbling, barely staying ahead of certain death, traveling constantly, sleeping on mildewed mattresses in condemned homes and living off of greasy spoon diner food and gas station coffee, gathering scars. He chose the pain and confusion and nightmares, turned his back on the peace and paradise and the certainty of orders or the power to change it at his whim. Blue eyes meeting green, he offers the unvarnished truth, thick with unspoken meaning. "I don't want to go back."

He's chosen Dean's fucked up notion of living over Heaven. And he'd do it again.

They are there again, that moment with nothing between them but Dean's insecurities and Castiel's inexperience, poised somewhere between friends and brothers at arms and something else that Dean doesn't want or intend to put a name to. Tomorrow, they will gather up the Grace of a god, and that shadow is going to loom over Castiel the rest of his life, no matter the outcome or how short or long that existence proves. Castiel clearly believes this is the end, and he’s still here.

Where Sam still harbors notions of giving up the life and settling down, where John had never been able to turn away from his obsession long enough to notice what he'd done to his boys, where Mary had been snatched away, Castiel has chosen _Dean_.

No, Dean doesn’t need Sam’s teasing undertones to point out what’s happening here. Castiel’s never attempted to hide this from him—even when things fell apart, even once they were on opposite sides, Cas stared at Dean like he was the center of the universe. For the first time, though, Dean doesn't make himself look away.

“C’mere.” There’s no hesitation when he finally moves; Dean's fingertips skim the rough stubble of Cas’s jaw before they bury themselves in the fallen angel’s hair, drawing him closer. Dean closes the gap between them, tongue tracing the seam of Castiel's lips until the other man seems to come to life from stone with a gasp, surging into the kiss like a drowning man seeking air. In this moment, Dean knows this isn't changing anything about _who_ he is, or who Cas is.

They may both die tomorrow, but Dean is going to bank on them living to tell the tale, even if they have to rip up the ending all over again.

They’re both irreparably screwed up.

. . . But it’s worth it.


	13. Chapter 13

Just after dawn's light creeps through the old house, while it's still quiet and calm in world, Dean prods his brother with a booted foot, stirring him towards wakefulness unceremoniously before crouching down and pulling one of Sam's headphones from his ear. "Rise and shine, Sammy. Get your stuff together and let's go."

Sometime in the night, upon returning from Fort Dodge, Sam had retrieved his iPod from wherever he kept it when he wasn't profaning Dean's baby with anemic soft rock, or whatever crap that Dean can hear the tinny threads of through the headphones. No wonder he can sleep listening to it, it’s bland and boring. When Sam glares at him blearily from his spot on the living room floor, Dean swings the earbud on its cord, letting it lightly rap Sam across the nose with each rotation until reflexes catch up with his waking mind and Sam snatches it out of the air on the next turn, pulling the other out and turning off the music. Dean flashes an unrepentant grin in the face of his brother's glare, rocking back on his heels and ignoring Sam's knowing look. "You're awake before me, and you're in a good mood."

"Everyone wakes up early when they're camping, don't they?" Camping. Winchester style. Sam doesn't seem to believe this and Dean doesn't care, his mood unshaken. "And anyway, enjoy it while it lasts, Sam. Busy day ahead of us, c'mon."

Sam rolls to his feet, grabbing his bag and shoving on his boots, confused by the mixed signals. He doesn’t _think_ he’s missed anything, doesn’t think he’s been _wrong_ about what he’s been patiently waiting to finally play out, giving Dean and Castiel room. Outside, he can hear Cas loading things into the trunk of the Impala, and from the porch he watches as Dean holds his hand up, catching the keys when the angel tosses them to him. Sam's never been the best at reading Castiel, but he seems faintly exasperated by Dean's good mood, shaking his head slightly as Dean leverages himself into the driver's seat and cranks up AC/DC, laying on the car horn and sticking his head out of his window. "Get a move on, Sam!"

It’s just a day. Like every other day. Sam frowns and shoves his headphones into his pockets, wondering if he really needed to give them privacy after all. He _can_ _’t_ have misread _everything_ over years of watching this dance.

As Castiel opens the back door of the car Sam meets him on the passenger's side, an eyebrow raised, poised partway between trunk and the stairs. "You're not sitting up front?"

Castiel stares at him blankly, a foot already on the floorboard, hand braced on the already half-closed door between them and ducked down prepared to sit, and the kind of confusion that is too genuine to be faked painting his features. He answers as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. "That's your seat."

And that's it. Castiel disappears into the backseat of the Impala, Dean sings along to "Shoot to Thrill" while drumming his hands on the wheel, and Sam rakes his hand through his hair and stares in the car at the two of them, before shaking his head in confusion, closing the trunk over their bags and their arsenal and climbing into the shotgun seat.

"Where to first?"

"You can fill us in on what you learned over breakfast. We need to hit a church up on our way there. First, though, I want to find a gym or something, crash it, and use their showers."

"Yes." Castiel agrees solemnly from the back seat, and Sam turns slightly to take him in fully: hair sticking up every which way, thoroughly disheveled, clothes rumpled, pink-cheeked and overtired. All doubt dissipates. Turning back, Sam grins at Dean, earning him a finger raised from the wheel and a threatening "Not a word, Sam."

"I didn't say anything!"

"You 'didn't say anything' very loudly."

". . . I didn't hear him." Castiel's confusion draw a guffaw of laughter from Sam and Dean rests his forehead against the steering wheel for a moment, before shifting gears and spinning the tires on the gravel road, leaving the abandoned house behind them and Castiel to his bewilderment about the Winchesters’ exchange.

Behind them the rising sun paints the blacktop roads and fallow fields in blinding light, its fingers touching everything. Ahead, the west is obscured by storm clouds on the distant horizon, lightning licking cloud to cloud, ominous and directly in their path. Castiel's silence lingers, and Sam catches Dean checking the mirror regularly, stealing glances at the angel in their backseat, and he witnesses the slow death of his brother's high spirits. Eventually, he can't resist covertly taking a look at Castiel himself, his reflection visible in the side mirror. Head resting against the window, shoulders slumped, Cas stares off at the clouded horizon with a furrow marring his brow and his face otherwise impassive.

Dean changes the tape at the first deep, carrying knell of "Hell's Bells," and doesn't resume singing along when Led Zeppelin begins piping through the car, his hands now still in their grip on the wheel, knuckles white.

"This is gonna work, Cas." Dean promises, green eyes fixed on the road, and Sam can't help but think. . . as well intentioned as they always are, none of their promises ever quite work out. And his brother never seems to be allowed happiness for long.

The three of them just aren't that lucky.

 

 

* * *

 

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been. . . oh, at least five hours since my last confession." Dean drops into a pew at the front of the otherwise empty church as Sam and Castiel trail in behind him, and the priest raises an eyebrow at the three of them while closing his book.

"I am not a priest. Speaking to me isn't reconciliation. . ." Castiel corrects Dean, earning a smirk from Dean who doesn't look away from the priest, and a headshake from Sam, who claps a hand on the angel's shoulder and leads him to the side. They’re going to have to work on his sense of humor and his tendency to rattle off inconvenient truths. Though Sam would also like to cuff his brother upside the back of his head for baiting Cas on the job.

"I'm guessing this isn't actually a confession, son." The priest's slow, southern drawl is more Georgia than Iowa, and he has the build of an old football player long gone to seed, a small-town priest who drops himself down onto the first pew, turned sideways with his arm along the back, and a shrewd expression on the three men in his halls. "You here about the miracles?"

Dean finger-guns at him, settling back into the thin padding of the pew and then spreading his hands. "Call me curious. What's your take, Padre?"

"Well, 'Curious,' I figure sometimes good things happen we can't explain with science, and no amount of skepticism thrown their way unravels it as a hoax, and you gotta start believing what your eyes are seeing and accept where it's coming from." As Sam joins Dean on the pew, Castiel circles the room, drifting towards the stained glass windows with the look of someone in pain, and the old priest watches Cas warily before turning his head to look at the boys. "You're carrying a gun." He tells Dean calmly, in a quiet undertone. "So's your friend over there, he's what tipped you. . . too lean to hide that holster under the shirt when he moves, and he swings his arms to clear it like he's not used to it. So, I'd bet Too-Tall here is packing too. You don't walk like cops, you don't sound like you're from here, and you're not dressed like you're from the papers."

Lips pressed together, Dean offers a grudging look of admiration at the priest, folding his arms. "Good eye. We're not here to start trouble. How's a cop become a priest, Father. . . ?" He doesn't question his instincts, and he isn't let down by them.

"Emery. How's a pair of boys like you end up Hunters?" And he doesn't show doubt, either, in his counter. Sam raises both eyebrows and looks at Dean, then back at the priest.

"You're clued in, Father?"

"Something truly Evil comes into your life, you got a few choices on how to deal with it." He gestures between himself and the boys. "You're lookin' at the two of the four most common outcomes."

"What're the other two?" Sam asks, and the priest's eyes become tired, world-weary, emphasizing the lines on his weather-beaten face.

"Victim. Monster." It's Cas who answers, low and somber as he stands facing away from them, the momentary sunlight peeking through the clouds shattering into multicolored facets through the window. "Hunter. Shepherd."

"Faithful." The old priest corrects, expanding the final term to incorporate his flock, but he accepts the others without comment, turning his gaze back to the third of his visitors. Dean watches the wariness creep into his eyes again and realizes the priest hadn't included Castiel in his accounting of their respective roles. He didn't ask how _three_ boys had become Hunters. "You know, we've had a lot of ruckus recently 'back at the office,' or at least among people of my line of work. There's a stained glass window in Westboro now, looks an awful lot like your friend there."

Castiel turns his regard from the window as if offering himself for comparison before the old priest's eyes, and Dean's standing though what he's going to do he's not sure. Get them out of there quickly, maybe. His voice is a warning, uncertain where this is going to go. "Cas. . ."

"I faced evil, and chose the wrong path." Castiel says, clear as a bell, and Dean and Sam wince as the option of leaving without calling attention to themselves further goes out the window. "Now, I am trying the other,"

The old priest rises to his feet and Dean steps between the priest and the angel, a hand planted on Castiel's chest and another outstretched at the cleric. "Look, Father. Like I said, we're not here for trouble. We need something blessed and some information. . ."

"Who _are_ you? Who are you really?" the old priest questions Cas, and Dean can feel strength in the old man that age and the extra weight can't hide. He shoots a look at Dean's face, and shakes his head dismissively. "You can sit back down, boy, my brawling days are behind me. I'm not suicidal. But the man showed up declaring himself God. . ."

"Castiel." Cas answers as he cocks his head to the side as if he's listening to something none of them can hear. His words are distant, only partially focused on their conversation and unsteady on his feet. "They're on our trail. They're coming."

"The _angel_ Castiel?" The priest drawls, incredulous. Suddenly Dean is bracing his arm underneath Castiel's to keep him upright, and Cas has missed something between. His head is ringing, pounding, flashes of images he shouldn't be getting, glimpses from a connection that should be closed.

"I've got you, Cas." Dean is murmuring too faintly to be heard by the others, but the sound of it crashes in Castiel's ears, splintering and breaking against the inside of his skull and the first roll of thunder in the distance is agonizing. Sam's on his feet as well, and the boys lower him carefully into a pew, Dean following him down to keep him braced upright as if he can put himself between Cas and pain. He's fighting the images, the sensations, the sound of his family screaming. He understands, now, how Anna could have ended up institutionalized as a human. This is madness.

Grinding his teeth together, Castiel breathes deeply, slowly through his nose until he can disentangle himself deliberately from Dean, resting his head in his hands. "It's over. There was an ambush in Wisconsin. Crowley is pressing his advantage. Heaven is going to lose."

It's a long silence that follows the declaration, the Winchester brothers exchanging looks over Castiel's head, unsure how to respond. The two armies on their trail are fighting each other: Godzilla and Mothra, setting them loose on each other is the _ideal_. And yet. . .

"What in God's name is going on here?" Father Emery finally explodes, and Castiel grits his teeth at the noise, lifting his head from his hands and fixing a glower on him, his voice a low growl.

"The armies of Heaven and Hell both are going to descend on this town within the day, and they are going to fight over your 'miracle.' Heaven's destabilized, weakened, and they have no way to replenish their ranks. When they see that they are losing this battle, they will smite this town rather than allow the forces of Hell any able innocent bodies to crawl inside of. Every man, woman and child will be killed, and Heaven will still be unable to secure the power here. The King of Hell will harry them here until they fall or retreat, using this as a proving ground for his recruits and providing a common enemy and a phantom cause in order to secure his power base. _That_ is what is going on 'in God's name.' And whether you name him or not, Father, God has shown little interest in this matter."

"Bless a vessel. Answer the questions they ask of you. And then gather whatever of your flock will listen and _run_." Shoving himself to standing, Castiel doesn't wait to see the effect of his words, booted feet echoing on the stone floors of the small church.

Outside, the rain and the wind begin to pick up: by tonight Storm Lake, Iowa is destined to live up to its turbulent name.


	14. Chapter 14

This is not how it is supposed to end.

Castiel began the morning content, warm, validated in his choices, his affection reciprocated, and feeling for the first time as if forgiveness and redemption were not so far out of his reach. It was the first peace Castiel had found outside of Heaven, the first _honest_ peace in his long existence of battle and war, and he knew that were he to make it back to his home, to earn a place amongst the mortal souls in Heaven, it could only be that moment that he would dwell in for eternity.

He knew even then that it wasn't to be. Castiel turned his back on Heaven, and his sins have not been torn away with his wings in his fall. Every mile put between them and that house, every hour ticking by beyond that peaceful morning is a step closer to Hell. Looking out over a town of ten thousand innocent souls that will die simply for having been touched by his Grace, caught as everything has been in the destruction he brings with him into everything he touches. . . Castiel knows there is no hope for him in the afterlife.

All he has is life. He doesn't expect to have even that by the time the sun rises again over the lake. All he can hope to do is minimize the damage and ensure that Dean's eternity can have peace. He can help put off that eventual trip so that Dean will have the chance to snatch up whatever moments of happiness he can and put his own demons behind him.

The sun has lost its battle with the clouds, and even at its zenith it can no longer penetrate the growing storm. The waters of the lake churn in the distance as Castiel watches it from the higher vantage point of the small church on its hill, his view unobscured over the low stone wall and gravestones of the cemetery tucked into the shadow of the church spire. In the foreground, a stone angel kneels over a gravestone, her head bent in prayer, marble wings tucked closely to her back, and the rain streaming down her chiseled face makes her seem as if she's weeping over the mortal remains interred beneath her.

Castiel empathizes with her, this unknown, nameless sister. Such a human emotion, empathy. Pain on another's behalf.

He hears Dean coming before he sees him; the hollow boom of the heavy church doors closing and then the thump of his boots on the steps down. Collar turned up against the weather, steps brisk to try and outpace the rain, Castiel turns his head to watch him. He can see the hunter’s concern and worry and knows that Dean's looking for him, afraid that he's disappeared to handle things on his own.

The thought had occurred to him. Had he his wings, he would have. This is going to go poorly, and the farther away from ground zero the Winchesters are, the better. Not that they'll listen to that reasoning. Both Dean and Sam are entirely willing to throw themselves on a grenade: they fail to realize that this is an atom bomb. 

Dean latches his gaze on Castiel and his steps slow again. He approaches the car and the fallen angel perched atop it as one might a skittish colt, afraid it might run, afraid it might trample you as it did. Could Castiel see himself as Dean does, he might understand it. Hair rain-soaked and plastered to his skin like rivulets of black chasing down his temples and his forehead, body folded in on itself in his perch on the hood of the Impala, there’s a sense of hopelessness to the scene, settling into the lines of his face and the hollows of his eyes and weighing him down. 

"You shouldn't have brought me here." It's not blame he's assigning, but there's a sense of fatalism nonetheless to the flat, quiet delivery. "I should never have come." Every crash of the waves, every roll of thunder, Castiel can feel it pulling at him. This isn't a sense of something he's missing, some piece of himself that will lock into place, snap back into his being. _He_ is the missing piece, a tiny drop facing an ocean with no chance of taming it. He will be lost, swallowed in the depths again. Already he can feel it, inexorable as the tide, pulling him back in.

It’s the end.

Dean has never been one for public displays. He's never minded people looking at him (particularly women, and particularly in bars—he knows damned well he‘s a handsome man), but he plays his affections close to the vest and he saves his issues for when he’s alone with a bottle. Alone in the storm in front of a deserted cemetery and a church with only his brother and one old priest inside it, though, he knots his hand in the collar of Castiel's shirt, pulling him until he's sliding down the hood of the car and level with him again, and he tries to breathe something, anything, back into that emptiness rolling off of Castiel. The kiss is brief and raw, and Dean breaks it quickly, resting his forehead against Castiel's for a moment. "Damnit, we're making it through this, Cas."

It's another promise that he has no way of keeping, and there's no need for Castiel to counter it. His silence answers for him, but after a moment he nods as if in response to some unspoken signal to separate, and Dean steps away again, opening up the Impala and digging in the glove compartment. When Sam and the priest come down the steps, Father Emery opening his umbrella against the storm, it's to Dean pressing pain medications into Castiel's hand for the headache, both knowing it won't help.

". . . have blessed stranger things before for lesser reasons." The priest is calmly remarking, far more placid than the situation warrants, than a man who has been told to evacuate his town and run for his life before Heaven and Hell war in his back yard should feel. "There was a man who once wanted me to bless his car . . ."

Dean knows this is his cue and that Sam is looking to him to provide the punch-line, but he can barely muster up the humor to be the big brother and lighten the situation for him. His response is halfhearted. "Yeah, well, maybe later. Padre, you should go. You've done everything you can for this, you should get your people and clear out. Get word to as many as you can."

"And say what, son? And go where?" It's an honest question, the priest looking to Dean calmly, and he shakes his head. "I will do what I can, but. . . do you know what the difference is, between you and me? The hunters and the clergy?"

"Booze, sex, and better clothes?"

"My pantry is surprisingly well stocked, there's truth in that one I'll grant you, at least in my denomination, and son you're wearing flannel. No. The difference is _hope_. Belief. God will provide." Castiel makes a noise in the back of his throat that Dean can't place, and the priest's attention swings back to him, a surprising sympathy in his gaze. "May be a bit presumptuous of me, considering the circumstances and who we are in the pecking order so to speak, but I'll pray for you too Castiel."

Raising his head from his hands Castiel looks to the old priest, quietly despairing—he's had people pray _to_ him before . . . notably the two men bracketing the car, though eloquent they've never really been. But praying _for_ him is a newer experience. "I've seen men lose faith before—looking for the big sign, the solid answer. Sometimes you need to look at the little miracles." The priest's lips quirk faintly, sadly, and he steps forward resting a hand on Castiel's shoulder, his umbrella temporarily offering a respite from the storm. " _Castiel._ ‘The shield of God.' Perhaps most important for you to remember would be, 'The Lord is my shelter.' Strange times, when tired old men have more faith than angels, but I believe you'll win through."

It takes Castiel a moment to respond, bowing his head, and he doesn't directly answer. "It wasn't your fault." He fixes the old priest with an astute gaze, the unfathomable depths of Heaven on the face of a man whose shoulders are stooped with the weight what he had been and what he is now. He flicks his gaze to the cemetery indicatively. "What happened to them. You wondered when I arrived if I came here for you as I did to the others when I was. . . lost, but you’re not to blame. They've found peace and you will be with them again."

The strong old hand squeezes his shoulder, and this time it's the priest that bows his head before breaking away, southern drawl thicker with emotion. "Thank you." Taking a deep breath, the priest offers his hand to the Winchesters in turn, grip firm. "I'll pray for you boys too. Kick their asses back to Hell, and come back to see me when you do. First drink'll be on me."

As the priest walks away Sam leans against the car, looking down at Castiel with curiosity in his eyes. "How'd you know that? About him, I mean." Sam has always believed more than Dean, has always clung to some romanticized version of faith. Dean knows Castiel better, but Sam still looks to him as if he should be a creature of the divine and spread hope.

The gaze he swings to Sam, looking up at the younger hunter in the rain, is hollow—the thousand-yard stare distant and unfocused as once again he dashes Sam’s meager threads of hope of better answers for himself.

"I didn't. Loss. Loss is the answer. How a police officer becomes a priest. How two boys become hunters." Castiel slides off of the hood of the car, feet on the ground fully again, and begins walking around to the back of the car. "He has nowhere to go but a home he has built for himself in the shadow of a graveyard, and found faith in hopes he would see them again. I knew nothing but what he needed to hear, and the inevitable form of his Heaven." Opening the back door of the Impala, he slips inside and closes the door against the rain to wait for them.

Castiel had started faithful and become the monster. But he still knows the ache of belief.

* * *

 

Entrepreneurial spirits set their sites on Storm Lake the moment the miracles began, with the first healing. On the shore a half-dozen trailers selling food, mementos, articles of faith and kitschy t-shirts have been closed against the storm, their shutters drawn and their wares packed away. The word hasn't spread far enough to fill the campgrounds more than half way and the motels still show vacancies, but the potential tourist trap has been recognized.

Sitting on a covered picnic table on the shore, surrounded by signs of the human nature to look for profit, Dean finds his gaze drawn to the small tribute sharing space with him beneath the pavilion of a small plane worn by the wind and weather and time, it's adorning flowers wilted and pathetic. Someone scrawled 'Bye bye, Miss American Pie' on the side of the small monument in marker, and a young man's portrait is held behind glass, protected from the elements. Roger Peterson of Storm Lake. Died, February 3, 1959 in a small plane crash with his passengers—The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens—who would live on forever as one of the greatest tragedies in music history.

Whereas Peterson was just a regular guy no one would remember.

Dean raises the bottle of Wild Turkey to his temple and salutes the image silently, before draining the dredges of the bottle. He pulls a face at the faint taste of oil transferred up by his grip, but he needs the bottle empty.

Just as well they hadn't fully explained 'we're going to trap the Grace of God in an empty bottle of booze.' Probably not pretentious enough. But something about how ridiculous the plan is makes it worth it. It’s just the kind of insanity they've pulled off in the past. The war between Heaven and Hell fought over a bottle of cheap whiskey. Blaring 'Rock of Ages' at final throw-down of the Apocalypse. Chuck ought to be paying him for coming up with this crap.

And anyway, Castiel is _Dean's_ angel and knows better than to expect high class from him even when it come to their spiritual destinations. Meanwhile, Dean could use a little Hunter's Helper right about now anyway and the familiarity of giving a middle finger to the entire universe.

Dean knows instinctively when his brother joins him, and he raises the bottle, tipping it upside-down indicatively. "And now we're officially good to go. Bobby on his way?"

"Yeah. Half an hour outside of town. He's on the line with the Sheriff's Office now, trying to convince them this is a freak storm that's going to be bad enough to need evacuations. We're from the National Weather Service if anyone asks."

"Meteorologists? Sexy. You got the stuff?"

"Yeah, we're set." Dean and Sam, for all of their issues, are a well-oiled machine when it comes to hunting together. The plan is set, they know their parts in it, and they don't need to belabor it all. 

"Know what we're doing?" Sam shrugs in response, the unspoken answer being 'do we ever?'

"Not much different than a summoning, really. Couple of different ingredients."

"Like Cas." The main ingredient in their modified Grace-summoning is crouched just beyond the concrete of the pavilion at the edge of the lake, the water lapping over the toe of his boots and his fingers pressed into the clay shoreline. "You got a lock yet?" He tosses at the angel's back over the sound of the storm, and Castiel rises to his feet, letting his breath out slowly and tipping his chin at the lake.

"There."

"There like the _lake_ 'there'? The whole thing?" Dean squints through the runoff at the expansive stretch of water, 3200 acres if the brochures are to be believed. ". . . I think we're gonna need a bigger boat. Or a bigger bottle."

Castiel turns to face them, brow furrowed. "I don't think a boat is required. We should do this from the shore. And the size of the vessel is immaterial. The Grace is spiritual, not physical."

". . . We're staying in and watching some movies when we're done with this, Cas. Some references you miss, and no one'll ever buy you as a normal dude." The other part. . . well, hell. He knows it; a Grace the 'size of the Chrysler Building' fit into a vial the size of an egg. He’s nervous, and falling back on lip. "You couldn't have aimed for a nice empty field somewhere?"

" _I_ did. The Grace. . ." Castiel pushes his rain-soaked hair off of his forehead, looking faintly exasperated, and Dean can't help but feel comforted by the familiarity of Cas's annoyance, a welcome break in the depressed and fatalistic tones he's vacillated between since he Fell. "The majority of the world's surface is covered in water, Dean. Strictly speaking, the odds were in favor of this from the start of my fall.”

The weather alert sirens begin blaring, deafening as they echo over the lake and Sam's spirits seem to rise even as Castiel grimaces at the noise. "Bobby's done it. Okay. That's our cue. Let's get this started."

Tomorrow, when the sun rises over the lake again and the storm has passed and the miracles stop, Dean figures someone will point at the spray paint they’re laying onto and around the picnic table as Satanic, as sabotage of God's gift to the great state of Iowa, but they can't risk the wind shifting and marring a chalk circle and they don't have time to be subtle about it. Ziplock bags of ingredients are carted out of the Impala's trunk, the three men working together rapidly, terse commands shared between each other and the empty bottle resting at the center of a bowl of ingredients, surrounded by the sigils, circles within circles.

They’re forming a sympathetic connection: building from the spark of Castiel's cobbled-together soul to the raging fire of his Grace, and through that to the fifty million souls worth of power bound within it, to bind it further into the bottle. They are handling radioactive waste bare-handed with only a prayer to guard them. Sam reads them in Latin from hand-scrawled pages while Castiel rolls his sleeve up over the bottle, ripping off the gauze over the most recent of his cuts and placing the blade there again to deepen it. The blood flows freely, and Castiel clenches his fist, tilting his arm to let the first splattering of blood kiss the lip of the empty bottle, dribbling in to coat the bottom.

"And now the water." Castiel raises his arm away, letting the blood trickle down his forearm unchecked and over his wrist, following the lines of his palm like creeks and tributaries as he meets Dean's eyes. "Be ready to light it."

He doesn't wait for confirmation or linger for last words, though in that final moment he stares at Dean as if he has just this once to memorize him, to finally commit him to memory. He doesn’t give Dean time to address it; they are men of action, not words. Stepping off the edge of the pavilion Castiel stalks through the rain until he can crouch at the lake's edge again, cupping his hand and letting the water fill it, mixing with his blood.

The call of his Grace is crowding Castiel's mind, begging to be allowed to fill him again, to make him complete. Deep within the lake a light seems to grow, responding to Castiel's blood and shaped by his resolve. It is a maelstrom of power, one that has overwhelmed him before. . .

Sam offers invocations and prayers in Latin. Dean lights the herbs and ingredients within the bowl, heating Castiel's blood within the chosen vessel of the Wild Turkey bottle. Castiel exerts his will, reaching out and dragging on that endless reservoir of power and then forcing it from his mind again, creating a conduit in his blood.

This is a force greater than any of the archangels, greater than he'd ever had a right to touch. . . Jimmy Novak hadn't survived it the first time, his soul ripped away as fifty million others took its place. His spirit waits in Heaven for his family, dutifully rewarded for his sacrifice while Castiel wears his form like his own. To manage this as a human himself and not end up a drooling empty vessel in its passing. . . it will take a miracle.

The crack of lightning carries with it the deafening ringing, the barrage of images.

The first bay of the Hounds rolls with the thunder.

Castiel's body arcs, white light screaming through his mind, his body, pouring out of his eyes and his mouth and the fingertips of his outstretched hand towards the bottle. Dean and Sam shut their eyes to the light, Dean throwing up a shielding arm over his face and Sam yelling out the final lines of the ritual from memory now as he blindly stretches a hand out to the bottle, grabbing the neck of it to guide himself as he drops the papers and slaps the blessed and pen-knife engraved cap atop it, the light winking out as Castiel slumps into the water.

"Cas!"

Dean's scrambling over the slick clay between them to check on Castiel when a force slams him into the support beam of the pavilion instead, crumpling him to the ground. He looks up to see Crowley's smirk as the demon stands over him, he can feel the breath of the Hound on his face, the smell of Hell that haunts him and hear the arrival of a dozen cars rolling into the lot behind them, ignoring the klaxon alarms. Hell's forces have arrived. "Nicely handled. I knew I could count on you two buffoons to take care of the dirty work for me. Find the souls, bring _him_ here, package it all up nicely for travel. You're so bloody _thick,_ I think I may actually be growing fond of your idiocy. I'll be taking my souls and the angel, now, though."

It’s a trap. It was all a trap.

On the pavilion Sam stands holding the bottle, horror and understanding in his gaze as Crowley looks at him, holding his hand out with mock politeness. "Now, come out of the circle and hand me the bottle and I won't turn your brother into Kibbles and Bits."

"Don't. . ." Dean begins, only to cut off in a strangled noise.

Lightning cracks, ear-splitting, hair raising, and the entire world seems to go white once more, the thunder clap immediate: the heart of the storm. When the world resolves itself again, Castiel is on his knees, pale and slack but breathing, held up by a slender arm around his neck, an angelic blade pressed to his sternum.

On the shore, the lightning dances again, casting the impression of outspread wings along the ground emanating from the half-dozen slender men and women in black business suits arrayed against Crowley and his hoard and his hound, against Dean sprawled on the ground and Sam within the circles and Castiel limp and helpless in Hester's arms.

War has found Storm Lake and divided them already.


	15. Chapter 15

Sam Winchester has been in some fairly unbelievable positions in his young life. At a mere six months old, he had been leveraged into place by Demons and Angels, creating a destiny that defied belief and description. With a few drops of blood to curse him, the loss of his mother teaching him the fragility of life, the obsession of his father shaping him into a soldier, and his elder brother desperately trying to give him something normal—homework and school plays and Christmases of stolen gifts—until he had joined the 'family business.' He's been blood-addicted, hosted Lucifer, thrown himself into the mouth of Hell, lost his soul, regained it, gone mad, was cured, and at this point there’s little about his existence that can be classified as normal.

This situation is improbable even in his experience.

Demons to the left of him. Angels to the right. The King of Hell and the leader of Angels both looking at him expectantly. His brother sprawled in the short space of land between concrete and water, pressing himself back into the earth as if he can make it swallow him and shelter him from an invisible Hound with its jaws around his neck waiting to bite down. His friend clutched in the arms of an angel, looking too dazed and winded to really grasp the situation fully, though color is flooding his face again, awareness finally creeping into his blue eyes.

Through it all the wind howls over the lake and the rain lashes down. Sam can feel power gathering around them, something shifting in the air, sulfur and ozone and rain-wet soil, and energy crackling and setting the hairs on his arms standing on-edge.

There is no doubt that this is a stalemate of some sort, but Sam doesn't know _how_. They've been led into this trap, and he can't place why. The bottle in his hands still smells like his brother's whiskey, even as it glows from within with pure light, and he knows somehow the answer is in that.

"Crowley." Hester greets, contempt twisting her otherwise regal features and she shifts her grip on Castiel, though the angelic sword presses no closer to him.

The King of Hell, in contrast, smiles welcomingly but it never reaches his cold eyes as he inclines his head and offers a single word in salutation as if it was her name. "Bitch."

Sam knows what his choice will be, if these two sides try to make him pick between his brother and the fallen angel. He knows Dean will never forgive him, but it’s an _obvious_ decision, one he knows Castiel would never blame him for. If forced to choose between a friend and his brother, Dean's welfare will win every time. He knows that if Castiel were in this position, he'd choose Dean too, and he's gotten past resenting that, over the last few years of watching them orbit around each other. If he's forced to choose, he'll choose Dean without hesitation, but for the moment the tension crackles in the air, and no one is making him choose. Something is _off_ about this. Something he isn't understanding.

All of their attention is caught by a low chuckle that turns into a full-blown humorless laugh, so out of place in the situation and so unfamiliar in that voice. There’s something mad and desperate in it, and as Castiel wraps his hands around Hester's immobile wrist and presses himself closer to the sword, he offers the first real _grin_ Sam has ever witnessed from him, teeth bared, and it's disturbing as hell.

"You can't do it. Neither of you." Someone has figured out the game, and Sam turns his head, Dean's eyes turning toward the lake, wide and afraid, both Winchesters looking to Castiel for answers.

"What the _hell_ is going on, Cas?" Dean's words are strangled, pained, and they can see the blood on his neck, the pressure of invisible teeth breaking his skin, the terror he’s hiding behind bravado apparent in his eyes. This is his great fear, they all know. Dean remembers the Hounds ripping him apart at Lilith's command, and he remembers what came after.

Castiel shifts his gaze to Dean, and the heat of his growing fury is nearly palpable as he then looks up at Crowley standing over him, his words the stentorian command of a former god. "Call off the dog."

"Unbind the souls." Crowley counters, offering a trade. The king of the crossroads, always ready to make a deal.

"I will kill you, first." Hester promises, and Castiel tips his head back, looking up to her from his knees in the shallows of the lake, caught within her restraining grip.

"No, little sister. You will _not_. If you wanted me to believe that, you shouldn't have healed me. You need me _alive_ , both of you." Castiel's breathing raggedly, half laughing, half mad, and he turns his eyes back to the Winchesters as he explains hoarsely. "The souls are bound in my Grace. They needed you to lead me to it, needed me to gather it, and now they need me to free the souls for them to take. Crowley can't touch them. Can't even look at them, until my Grace releases them. Hester can't control it, not with my Grace so severed from Heaven. And if they kill me, they risk my soul going to the other's domain."

A stalemate based on the moral ambiguity of a fallen angel's soul. A creature of Heaven who has killed hundreds, who had sinned deeply and dwelled in that cardinal sin of Pride but fallen to it first in a state of self-sacrifice, taken the power only out of love, and who is truly repentant. Will he descend to the pit for his crimes and his guilt, or will the Father who had interfered on his behalf before snap him back to Heaven? There’s no precedent to establish a pattern. Castiel's life is preserved based solely on the unfathomability of God's will, his erratic interference in the past few years. The third party no side can claim to understand, and cannot hope to control—the lack of answers that have frustrated Castiel from the start is all that is saving his life now and foiling the plans of Heaven and Hell.

"Son of a bitch. You _were_ right, Cas. Never should have brought you here." Dean remarks, his own humor strained, conceding the point in a lover's argument. Cas accepts the implied apology with a slight dip of his chin as he leverages his feet below him again, leaving Hester with the choice of plunging the angelic blade into his heart or letting him stand.

Her hands fall loose, but nothing in her stance or expression changes.

"You will unbind the souls and release them to me." Hester promises, steady, without a trace of doubt to her tone. "I hold the only currency you care about."

Castiel turns, halfway between the Demon and the Angel, keeping both in his line of sight, up to his ankles in the water. Crowley snorts, shaking his head. "Wrong, princess. You holy lot, you're blind. It's about the _vices_. I've got him by the short hairs." Crowley gestures to the prone figure at his feet, leering. "Got a taste for the pretty boys, our Castiel. He'll roast himself before he lets me kill him."

There is something terrifying about the look of agreement that Hester turns on the King of Hell, and Sam feels a cold dread creep over him, stealing his breath away. "You're right." Hester's voice holds no emotion, no inflection. . .

Dean freezes, holding his breath in the moment, eyes meeting Castiel's across the distance between them, voice a strained warning. "Cas. . ."

Raising her hand, fingers bent, palm cupped, the self-proclaimed leader of heaven twists her wrist as if turning a light bulb, and somehow even in the storm they can all hear the gentle crack of Dean's neck breaking as his head twists impossibly to the left. The Hellhound's teeth inadvertently take his jugular with the violent motion, ensuring the job is done before muddy footprints show the creature's retreat back to Crowley's side, its quarry handled.

Dean Winchester's broken, mangled corpse lays still and unmoving in the mud.

"Well that was unexpected." Crowley remarks with an almost grudging respect into the momentary absolute silence, raising an eyebrow at the angel's ruthlessness.

Castiel and Sam both cry out in their horror at once as the reality of it settles in, the angel splashing and scrabbling his way ashore to gather Dean's body into his arms. His eyes are opened unseeing to the clouds above, rain pooling in green and gold and clinging to his face and lashes like teardrops, swimming there. Sam lurches to the edge of the circle but the shift of the Demons surrounding the pavilion keeps him from breaking it, reminds him that leaving the protection Castiel has built in Enochian will deliver the Grace and himself into their hands. Their black eyes turn towards him with the predatory intent of a pack of wolves.

He can only watch in horror from mere feet away as Castiel rocks Dean's body back and forth against his chest, folded over him, a hand pressed to his throat as if he can still repair it, his brother's blood staining them both as the fallen angel whispers denials into Dean's hair, his face buried there and hidden from them all.

"His soul is in Heaven, now, Castiel." Hester's voice is deceptively gentle, her words an inadvertent mockery of the solace that Cas had given the priest only hours before. There is no comfort here, only cold promise. "His soul is in Heaven, and I will _burn_ that Heaven down around him, destroy that soul."

She’ll unmake the only thing that remains of Dean, steal away his eternal reward and make his final moments of spiritual existence agonizing. . . unless Castiel releases the power of those souls to her. Unless he anoints her the new God.

Crowley has withdrawn a few steps back among the ranks of his gathered minions, eyes fixed on the angels spread before him. He still holds the upper hand in numbers and Sam knows it will be a matter of moments at most before he presses that advantage. He's calculating losses in his mind, prepared to take the risk and kill Castiel and leave it to the coin flip of chance. He will bank on the vices, as he said before, and count on Castiel's wrath to deliver the fallen angel into Hell and keep Hester from the power.

There's a shift in Castiel's murmuring and he slows the rocking motion to a stop as he changes his grip Dean's body, steel and purpose cording his muscles. It should be an awkward moment, watching a rain-soaked broken man lean over his brother's corpse, stealing a kiss from unmoving lips as if saying goodbye, but Sam's gone numb in horror and he can't look away. Fixed as he is on his brother's body, Sam can't miss it when Castiel looks up at him, blue eyes narrowed in fury, in resolve. . . and his hand pressed over Dean's unseeing eyes.

Castiel has _closed his brother's eyes_ and is sheltering them, waiting for Sam to register the movement, to understand the significance and the weight of his stare.

Hester is speaking again, somewhere far away. Crowley's people are moving. The battle begins in earnest as the angels and demons close on each other. The lightning crashes. The wind howls. And Sam and Castiel share a moment of complete understanding.

Neither the cold indifference of Heaven nor the raging hatred of Hell understands the irrational, unreasonable nature of _love_. Neither Sam nor Castiel is willing to accept a reality in which Dean is left sprawled and broken in the mud.

_Whatever it takes._

Sam shifts his grip on the bottle and twists before he can question the wisdom of this mutual decision, this unspoken plan. Crowley catches the movement and yells out a denial, reaching out a hand and his power to stay Sam's hand, but the bottle is free and in motion already and Sam throws his arm over his face, his eyes closing.

The bottle smashes against the side of the concrete airplane memorial, and the Grace of God is unleashed back into the world.

Pure white, blinding light consumes them again, burning out the eyes of the demons not quick enough to look away and staggering the line of angels on the shore.

Called by blood, a single spark, desperation and an iron will, the light finds its direction, slamming back into fragile human form.

Storm Lake grants it's last miracle, as the glowing hand resting over Dean Winchester's head sends him sitting bolt upright, gasping and panting, blood and injuries wiped away in a blaze of light.

And before him, rising to his feet from the mud and facing the lines of Heaven and Hell, a god is reborn in blood and death and pain and war and loss.


	16. Chapter 16

"Fire 'em up!"

Sam is an awkward thirteen year old, all hands and feet that stick out of the sleeves of his hoody and his too-baggy jeans, like a loose-skinned pup that will eventually grow to fit them, but his smile is childlike and contagious, all the moreso for such unbridled joy being so rare now that he _knows_ , now that his father is riding him, turning him into his little soldier.

Like Dean.

Dean, seventeen going on thirty, knows that his father would skin him alive for disappearing from the crappy extended-stay motel they've been living out of for the past few months while Sam finishes eighth grade, but he doesn't care. This moment, his brother throwing his arms around him, and the grin on his face as the light from the fireworks wash over him, it's all worth it when Sam laughs.

His brother gets to be a kid again, if just for a night.

And so does Dean.

 _Dean_.

The voice calls to him, quiet, as if it comes from a great distance. He can feel the power behind it begin to pull at him, and turns to look for the source but sees nothing. As he turns back, the field begins to burn, and Dean can feel the disjointed thought enter his mind.

_No, this isn't supposed to happen yet. It wasn't until the pinwheels that the field burned up._

The treetops catch fire, going up like roman candles themselves, and Sam is missing. The fireworks have stopped, but the fire is beginning to spread.

 _Dean_.

Sammy has his arms thrown around him again, but Dean is panting, soaked to the skin with rain water running down the back of his neck, hands sunk deep into the mud beneath him, and his entire body aches though he can't feel any cause to it.

The field around him is burning, his heaven going up in flames, and he can feel the heat of it, the suffocating smoke, and the eyes watching him from the shadows.

_Dean Winchester._

She'd twisted her hand and all Dean had been able to manage before he was swallowed by oblivion was try to warn Cas.

_Live._

The world snaps fully into realization at the sound of Castiel's voice in his mind, his presence, his ringing command.

Sam's arms tighten around him, dragging him through the mud towards the cover of the pavilion and the protection of the circle, and Dean gets his bearings once again, getting his feet beneath him, helping his brother help him.

Lightning flashes, and Dean can see Castiel standing between them and the lake, watching the Winchester brothers over his shoulder until they are clear from the frozen, timeless still-life of a battlefield. In that flickering light Dean can see the long narrow shadow of Castiel's body, and the expanse of phantom wings that seem to engulf the shoreline.

"What have you _done,_ Sam? What did you two _do_?"

Pressed back against the table, clutching his brother's sleeves to keep him safe, to reassure himself that Dean’s alive, Sam doesn't have an answer.

* * *

 

Mud and clay squelch beneath his feet with each step, gathering and clinging to the soles of his boots, making each step more difficult, heavier. He could dispense with walking altogether, simply will himself across the intervening distance, but he can see the flinch of the moaning, panting creature ahead of him with each step nearer he takes. Its perception has narrowed down to pain and sightlessness, the smell of its own charred flesh and the taste of blood filling its mouth, rolling over its panting tongue. He wants it to feel this, all of it. The pain. The panic. What it had instilled in _Dean_.

He can _see_ it. Blood on its teeth. Ragged strips of familiar flesh caught between its fangs.

His touch is light as he rests his hand atop the beast's head, the fond pat of a beloved owner as he takes a knee beside the blind pitiful creature whose teeth had ripped the flesh from Dean Winchester's throat, swallowed his lifesblood.

Hellhounds bay as they catch fire, Castiel notes with almost clinical detachment as he rises back to his feet. It howls as it burns from within, and the sound carries across the lake, louder than the raging wind.

He can see the effect it has on the others in their captivity. They fear him. They _all_ fear him.

. . . They _should_.

* * *

 

The crack of lightning and boom of thunder over the Alta-Aurelia High School gym sends the crowded inhabitants clustering together, sitting on gymnastic mats and bleachers, all looking up to the unremarkable metal beams and flickering lights of their temporary shelter and evacuation point as if they can see above to the unprecedented storm that has driven them from their homes in nearby Storm Lake.

Howling wind tears at the cheap tin roofing, threatening at any point to sheer it off, and each minute brings more souls into the crowded space. Their worried chatter, the crying of children, the nattering and complaining and desperate attempts to ensure families stay together die out when the thunder seems to ricochet off of each wall, hitting them like a physical force and shocking them each time into stunned silence.

In the doorway, police officers shepherd the people in, bus drivers fight in the weather to get as close to the entrance as they can before unloading their passengers, and people crowd close to the authority figures attempting to get answers, attempting to learn anything about the other evacuation points, or simply trying to seem important.

The man from the National Weather Service seems harried by the questions, gruffly dismissing each person to approach him, refusing to go further into detail on what kind of damage they can expect to their homes and their property. He’s busy trying to get a phone call to go through and cursing creatively when it won't (several mothers glare at him, covering their children's ears and leading them farther into the gym). Giving brisk commands to the police officers, he eventually strides out into the rain and the wind again, back to a battered old van and into the depths of the storm.

No one thinks anything of it. He is, after all, the expert.

The old priest watches him go but makes no move toward him. His umbrella resting against his foot, Father Emery sits at the top of the bleachers with a crowd gathering around him and spreading down the cheap wooden bleachers as he leads them in prayer.

If any of them wonder about the three young men the Father asks them to keep in their prayers, be they family or friends or the emergency services that are braving the night, they nevertheless are simply enfolded into the words of each of his flock along with their own missing family members and loved ones.

Father Emery prays for them all to survive the raging war outside.

(They assume it's simply metaphor for the storm.)

* * *

 

Castiel imagines it's Crowley's face beneath his hand as he presses his palm over the panicked, empty-eyed charred face of the creature beneath him—its _true_ face, a hideous and twisted shadow of a monster, evil beneath the façade of a simple farmer's wife who it brought swift death to by looking at his true form. He _will_ find the King of Hell later, and he will deal with the coward no matter where he has fled. But first, he will finish cleansing this battlefield. He is savoring these moments, each cold execution brings him a step closer to the one he _really_ wants, building the anticipation of it.

Beneath him the creature screams as it burns with the fires of his Grace, and slumps once more to the mud. It will not be returning to Hell. He created this mess. He bolstered their troops. Now he is summarily executing each and every demon to have dared stand against him, who dared to raise a hand to the two brothers under his protection.

He can feel his own brothers and sisters fighting against his compulsion to submit and he turns his gaze on them, letting the weight of his fury break them beneath his will. They needn't die, if they stop fighting him. But they _will_ learn from this demonstration. And they will watch it. _All_ of it.

He recognizes her face and the smell of her from the attack on Bobby Singer’s home, though her host has changed since he last saw her. The final demon, the last of Crowley's minions left abandoned on the field of battle had been smart enough to hide her eyes from the light of him. At Bobby’s he had been weak. He had let the monster go, let it inhabit another, let it continue to lead the hunt. In his visions, he had watched it kill his brothers in Wisconsin (they had been hunting him too, but that is immaterial now). At Bobby’s, he had watched it drive its power down into Dean's chest, wearing the face of Bobby's friend.

She had tried to rip his heart out.

With a look he is close to her, the distance evaporated before that thought finishes passing through his mind: _she had tried to rip Dean's heart out._ The waters of Storm Lake, turbulent and wind-tossed as they are, oblige him as he drives the demon by the neck down beneath the surface, the water hissing and popping against her skin. Holy Water, all of it. More potent than a rosary, the grace of an Angel. Even a fallen one.

He can hear a voice in the distance pleading with him to stop, familiar and hoarse and loved, and he wishes he could offer comfort, tell Dean that he brought him back and he will make it right, but he can't stop now. He has to fix this. He has to fix all of it.

Kneeling in the shallows of the lake, drowning, baptizing this twisted creature in his rage, he is so near now. Raising his eyes from the clawing, grasping hands trying desperately to win freedom and the face distorted beneath the water, he watches her watch him. It's time. With a press of will, Castiel thrusts the demon from its host, and beneath the water the smoke of it rises like oil from the woman's mouth, black and viscous across the surface. Hauling the creature's victim out of the lake, he tosses her back onto the shore, breathing but unconscious alongside the few others who survived their initial possession and the release of his Grace. As he stands he lets his fingers trail fire through the remnant of the demon, the flames flickering along the surface of the water and burning away its pollution from the world.

The light plays across Hester's horrified face and immobilized form, as Castiel watches her over it without approaching, mere feet away now.

"You killed him."

Raising his hand slowly, allowing her to see the movement, Castiel cups his palm, fingers bent, his eyes unblinking. When he turns his wrist, her neck doesn't just snap: she _twists_ like a wrung-out dishrag, snaps and pops, and hits the water hard.

But she's still alive. Resilient, angels, even the least among them. He _means_ for her to be alive. He isn't done yet.

"You attacked his paradise." Castiel continues in the same calm voice, and he wills himself beside her, looking down into her agonized face, her blonde hair floating on the water. She had stood over him, tortured him, but that was nothing, _nothing_ , compared to the pain of watching _Dean Winchester_ die because of him.

Somehow, she finds the strength to speak though her body should be unable. He leans into it, letting his former second in command, his younger sister, whisper her dying words in his ear as his hand unerringly dips below the surface of the water, grasping.

"You're a _monster."_

He weighs the word as he stands again fully, holding her fallen sword in his hand.

In the end there's only one answer he can give, sad and hopeless as it is.

"Yes. I am."

He's almost gentle as he drives the point of Hester's sword through her heart.

* * *

 

"Let _go_ of me!" Dean fights against his brother's restraining grip until eventually he breaks away: Dean’s desperation to pull free outweighs Sam's willingness to hurt the brother whose corpse he had just stood over, and short of hurting him there will be no restraining him.

Dean's muddied boot-print mars the circles as he lunges back out into the rain, ruining their protection, but the battle is over now: only the carnage remains.

"Cas. . ."

Standing up to his knees in the lake, Dean can see Castiel looking down at Hester's mangled corpse floating atop the water. He stops as Cas's gaze swings up to him, something broken and lost to his hollow stare. His eyes slide past Dean's face, and he can see the mask slip back into place solidly as Castiel simply ceases being in one place and arrives at his next destination.

"Remember this." Castiel's words rasp out at the immobilized angels before him, and Dean wonders how they could ever _forget_ it. The last few minutes have burned themselves into his memory, and he didn't even have the front row seat the angels do. "We've fought amongst ourselves too long. We've lost too many. _Never. Again."_ Thrusting his open palm out at them, Castiel unleashes the light of his grace and forcibly expels the angels back to Heaven. He turns, letting that light spread and the fallen but living hosts disappear, returned to safety to be found with the dawn.

All that's left are the dead, the Winchesters, and a heartbroken God.

"Cas, it's done. It's over. . ."

(Castiel can see the fear in Dean's eyes as he edges forward, stopping just outside of arm's reach. He put that fear there. He's become the monster again. All he'd wanted was to live, to be human, to be with Dean.)

"It's not over. I can _fix_ this, Dean." The souls are boiling beneath his skin, the power is consuming him, but he can change things. He can keep _this_ promise, as he kept Dean's for him when he resurrected him. They _are_ going to make it through this. He _can_ fix it. The rules don't apply, their luck is irrelevant. He will _make_ it work.

Castiel's nose bleeds steadily, mixing with the rain, but he doesn't register it any more than he recognizes the myriad injuries he's left unhealed on his form. He can deal with minor concerns later. There is far more at stake than his own welfare.

(Dean can see that he's killing himself, burning up from within from the power, the madness he has slipped back into. It's no longer the cold distant judgment of a God but a manic desperation that drives him. He's spent just long enough as a human, long enough in self-loathing and guilt and regret and pain, that he cannot shake it now.)

A dozen broken corpses litter the ground, twisted in the mud. Their eyes had been burned out by his Grace, their spirits ripped away leaving only their shells and the monsters that had ridden their skin. He'd executed those monsters, one by one for bringing these innocents here. . . but it's too many. Too many have died for him already. He can't allow this.

(It's easier to destroy than to create. That's how he knows he's a monster. As the lesions begin to bloom across the skin of his outstretched hand, roses on a field of snow, Castiel stops thinking of it as something to deal with later, a minor concern, and begins accepting it as a payment in blood; his own for theirs. They gasp with breath, restored, and he pants with exertion.)

"Cas, _stop!_ You're killing yourself!" Dean's closed the distance between them again, and it's good. It's a sign. He's fixing it. Showing Dean that he shouldn't fear him. He's Cas. Just Cas. When Dean cups his hands to Castiel's face, drawing his gaze back down to him, Castiel savors the contact despite the mud on Dean's hands and the blood on his face and the pain of it over skin that's tissue-paper fragile and threatening to slough away. "Stop. I'm telling you to _stop_ , Cas. Please." Dean's pleas reach him, but he can't respond. Not yet.

(On the shore, as Bobby's battered van pulls up behind him, Sam thinks he understands this. He's had power before, power he knew was destroying him, that it was terrible and horrifying and changed him from within but that he could do _good_ with. He could save people. Part of him, deep down, knows that he still misses the power even if he hates what it made him, and he would never again take it willingly. If it had been him, though, his choice able to save Dean's life. . . They are all three damned, broken souls of some sort or another.)

"Cas. . . don't make me watch you do this."

No. Not this. Not watch _this_. He needs to understand, not to watch. Castiel's hands rise to mirror Dean's own, pressing to the hunter's clammy skin, and Castiel thinks a single word, wills it to be so as he presses his thumbs to Dean's temples, mouthing the command over his lips.

_See._

In a shadowed wood full of birdsong and beauty, an angel is reborn. He had betrayed Castiel, but Castiel had betrayed himself long beforehand. The sin for which he'd died was Castiel's first, his perpetual cardinal transgression in the eyes of Heaven, of helping the Winchesters. He hadn't deserved his fate.

Castiel had murdered him.

_He can change this._

"I'm sorry, Balthazar. Forgive me, brother." The words echo in the woods, are whispered on the shore, and ring in Dean's mind with the vision.

There are so few angels left. So many demons. This is his doing. He cannot save them all, he cannot even the balance, but he can do this. This one small thing.

In an abandoned, run-down home, an angel is reborn. Her scarlet hair pools around her head like blood as she stares up at the cobwebs and dust motes dancing in the late evening sun and breathes in deeply, confused. She had been tortured by Heaven, turned and twisted by their persuasion and desperate to end it, to stop the fighting however she could. He knows the shame of turning on friends, of falling on the wrong path.

She deserves the chance to redeem herself, as well.

"Your battle is over, Anna. Live."

Castiel's knees give way beneath him on the shore of Storm Lake but Dean catches him before he can fall this time, bracing him upright. Castiel can't help but think that only this morning he'd had these arms around him, this peace, this forgiveness, and it's _right_. It's what he needs, what he craves to the depths of his being. Dean is shaking him, now, telling him to stop, pleading with him, and it's no less heartbreaking for being familiar. But he's not done yet. The visions continue for Dean, as Castiel's mind flits away again.

In a destroyed and ravaged motel an Archangel sits up, patting himself down with a look of surprise on his expressive face as he confirms that there's not a sword still sticking out of him like Gabriel-kabob, before slicking his brown hair back out of his eyes.

"Huh. Well, _that_ went well."

His sin had been fear of turning on his family and he had _overcome_ it. The elder brother who had run, who had tried to stay out of the wars of his brother and had proven that you could exert free will _as_ an angel without Falling, that they can choose path outside of mindless obedience or bloodthirsty violence. He is the only one of the original four to turn his back on fate, on Armageddon, and take a stand for freedom. The first to appreciate the beauty of humanity with all its flaws, and he had shown that the price of redemption is often death.

Gabriel is a flawed, broken creature himself, with his vices and his petty judgments and his tricks and his jokes hiding his fear. But he is perhaps the best hope their entire battered, war-torn and lost family has. He looks up, meeting Castiel's eyes over the miles, and raises an eyebrow.

". . . Woah, there. You look like _crap_."

Castiel has no witty rejoinder. He’s never grasped humor the way his brother does and he has no strength left to try. As the first convulsions rack his form, as the last of his power drains into this final miracle, the visions end and the world dims to black.

Neither man nor angels were meant to play at being God.


	17. Chapter 17

_Endings are hard. Any chapped-ass monkey with a keyboard can poop out a beginning, but endings are impossible. You try to tie up every loose end, but you never can. The fans are always gonna bitch. There's always gonna be holes. And since it's the ending, it's all supposed to add up to something. I'm telling you, they're a raging pain in the ass._

* * *

 

"Now I lay me down to sleep, our Father who ain't in Heaven. . . you know what, I don't care who's up there right now. . . can you hear me?" Dean's voice is a low, rough whisper in the dim room, his head bowed now and hands clasped around the cheap motel Bible.

* * *

 

"Any change?"

The motel lobby coffee in Sam's hands is weak and flavorless, tree-bark colored water that scalds his tongue as he takes a seat next to Bobby in the front of his van, looking out over the parking lot towards the railed walkway of the Sail Inn. He shakes his head silently without knowing whether Bobby is asking about his brother or his friend. Either way, the answer is the same. Both men are precisely where they had been when Bobby disappeared to make a supply run.

Dean still sits mute and angry at the motel table, one hand folded over the other fist at his jaw, exhausted and bleary eyed and stubborn in his denial and his pain and his undeniable anger at the entire world.

Castiel still lays limp and lifeless across the motel bed, the blankets drawn up over him as if it's simply the chill from the lake and the rain that have put him there.

"I've seen him bad off, Bobby. Pretty often. But I've never seen him like _this_ before." Sam confesses, watching the door to their motel room as if waiting for it to open and admit both men back into bright morning sunlight and a verdant world: the color in everything saturated in startling greens and placid blues overnight with the rain as Castiel had grown grayer and Dean's vibrancy had faded.

"I have." Bobby’s sigh seems to carry the weight of all his years as he looks to his boy, pulling his flask out of his jean jacket and offering it to Sam to fortify his coffee or ease his mind. "When you died."

It's a warning sign. The first indication.

Dean is willing to do a lot of things for the people he loves.

Accepting their sacrifice is not one of them.

* * *

 

"You don't owe us any favors. I've got no markers left to call in with you guys, and he doesn't either. I know it." Dean can taste the salt of his own tears on his lips as he presses them together, trying to find the words to offer, some deal or negotiation or trade he can make that will open the lines of communication with Heaven again. Each moment that passes silently, with no answer from Heaven and no bargaining tool from himself, has angered him. The _only_ person to ever answer his prayers even when he had nothing to offer in return now needs some sign that anyone else up there will get off of their feathery asses to help.

He might be suicidal. This might be just calling the attention back down to them of people Castiel had just kicked to the damned curb.

But it’s better than watching Cas wither away, an empty vessel without his soul or his Grace or any spark of awareness.

* * *

 

"You know, I _wondered_ about you two. I mean, you can't really do _that_ much intense staring without _something_ going on behind the scenes, you know what I mean?" The voice intruding on his peace pauses, the cheeky smirk nearly audible in his voice as he clicks his tongue. "Well obviously you know what I mean. But really, all that build up and your Heaven is the _cuddling_? I'm kinda ashamed for you right now, bro. Or Heaven's just a lot more boring than our neighbors. I dunno, it's been a _long_ time since I've been back in the old neighborhood. Say what you want about them being crazy, but Valkyries, for instance? Whew. They were _babes!_ Bit of a sex/death fetish thing going though, but I guess you gotta expect that."

"You talk too much." Castiel answers without lifting his head, eyes still closed. He is at peace, head resting on Dean's chest, listening to the steady thump of his heartbeat, and until moments ago he was dozing comfortably as he had been in the memory upon which this was constructed, sometime before the dawn on his last day on earth.

And then Gabriel invited himself to sit down on the edge of the bed and offer 'constructive criticism.'

"It _has_ been said once or twice. You know, if you're going to make me sit here and talk at you all tangled up in a sweaty pile of human, I'm _going_ to get bored, and then you’ll end up sleeping your way through the afterlife while your man-toy here assaults my delicate sensibilities with his creative interpretation of prayer. How is it that nobody's smote him yet?"

"Not for lack of trying." Castiel finally sighs wearily, sitting up and turning his stare on a smirking Gabriel. "You killed him several times yourself."

"Two hundred and thirty eight times, but who's counting? Other than me. I counted. What else are you supposed to do to while away a boring Tuesday afternoon, am I right?" Castiel watches him flatly until Gabriel sighs, throwing up his hands. "Does _no one_ up here have a sense of humor?"

* * *

 

"So what do we do?" Sam asks, leaning back against the headrest of the van, eyes closed, his limbs leaden and eyelids heavy. "We can't let him keep doing this. But what do we do, do we just. . . dump Cas off at a hospital somewhere?"

Shaking his head slightly, Bobby swigs from the flask as he weighs his words. These boys, they're his family. Closest thing he'll ever have to sons. Castiel, well, there's history there. . . he respects him, but he isn't ever going to be accused of being the feather-duster's biggest fan. He'll accept that Cas is important to Sam, and most significantly to Dean. He doesn't claim to understand the appeal, but he has eyes and he's known Dean nearly his entire life. He knows exactly how much Cas means to the boy. And for that, he'll grieve, too. "He won't last much longer. Even if we left him at a hospital and they stuck tubes in him, kept him plugging along a little longer. . . that's no way for a man to live, Sam."

Sam's eyes open, and Bobby can see the spark in them, the heat, the anger waiting for an outlet. "What're you saying, Bobby?"

"I'm saying whatever else he was, the man was trying to be a Hunter, was a Hunter's angel, and oughta have a Hunter's funeral. Or who knows what'll parade around in his bones. Made a lot of enemies that don't care whether you're alive or dead."

* * *

 

"You know what? Fuck you guys. Fuck all of you, you miserable junkless sons of bitches. We were _right_ , and if you weren't such fucking tight-assed apocalypse now egotistical bastards you'd realize that we're just. . ." He can't do it any more, he can't stay sitting by, he can't stay calm and watch this. The Bible goes crashing into the wall, its binding snapping, pages spilling from the leatherized cover, and Dean stalks to his duffle bag.

". . . _Trying to do the right thing!"_

* * *

 

"Why are you here?"

Gabriel shrugs, looking away, straightening the cuff of his jacket. "Figured I'd stop in, see how my brother was doing? What, family can't just..."

"We are not that caring of a family." Castiel counters before he can finish, cutting off another long spiel before it can gain momentum. Gabriel concedes the point with a faux-considering look.

"No, we're _really_ not. And you're not even my favorite brother. 'Course, the lot of you are a bunch of stick-up-the-ass . . ."

"Why are you here?" Castiel repeats, with the same tone and inflection as before.

"Hmm. Let's see. 'Why am I here'? _Maybe_ because you decided that you weren't just content with tearing up the whole Book of Revelations, you wanted a rewrite, to expand the cast, and pretty much fuck up _everyone's_ plans? You think I _want_ to be here, Castiel? Do you know what I went through to get away from this place?"

"Yes." There is nothing condescending about his response to the final question posed to him. Castiel, perhaps more than anyone, knows precisely how much it takes to get away from Heaven's grasp. He just has never managed it as successfully as the archangel before him.

"Yeah, I guess maybe you do. So imagine _my_ surprise when you drag yours-truly back from the great beyond, or wherever _we_ end up when we bite it, and dump this crap on me. Someone went and smote himself a bunch of angels and left no one around to stand in for Dear Old Dad around here except . . ."

"How did I get here?" Castiel interrupts once again, and Gabriel raises his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, unperturbed by the interruption. This one he'd been asking himself.

"Hey. Don't look at me, kid. I don't make the rules in this place. Apparently being a humorless rebellious violent human-loving pain in the ass makes you Daddy's favorite son now." Castiel's head cants slightly to the side and Gabriel rolls his eyes, arms folding as he presents the evidence. "You keep showing up places you shouldn't be. Beating people who, let's face it, you just don't have the juice to take on. Cojones, sure, but not the _power_ . . . not 'til you cheated, which shoulda burned you out in the first place. And you're the only one of us who's gotten the Divine Intervention treatment in how many millennia? Couple of times now. A lot. All recent. _Apparently_ including tucking you away _here_ to be this sorry son of a bitch's snuggle-bunny for eternity. What's He supposed to do, get you a Hallmark card? Do they make one for 'Sorry I skipped out on you for eternity. Keep on making waves, kiddo. Love, God.'?"

"I don't know. . ."

" _None_ of us know, dumb-ass. That's the _point_."

"But I died." Castiel confirms what he’s suspected since he found himself warm and comfortable, too practical-minded to accept Heaven at face value. Gabriel whistles in disbelief and incredulity, shaking his head.

"Wow. No flies on you, bro. Yeah. You kicked it. Your DIY soul did, at least. . . Grace seems to be looong gone too, you shoulda quit while you were ahead but you just couldn't resist me." Gabriel waggles his eyebrows, and Castiel just looks uncomfortable and annoyed at the teasing. "But that body's still plugging away down there, sucking air and drooling. Not your most attractive look, but then again. . . vessel. Wasn't ever really you to begin with. So, I'm left with a stumper. Since I'm apparently supposed to be the responsible big brother now that you’ve fucked over these guys by sticking my sorry ass back here in Cloud City as your big finale, I get to figure out what we're going to do with _you_."

Castiel watches Gabriel silently over the solid, sleeping memory of Dean Winchester.

"What, no suggestions?"

"What happened to the souls?" Castiel asks, and this time Gabriel _does_ seem annoyed by the tangent and insistence on directing the conversation.

"How the hell should _I_ know? I figure me, the humans you resurrected, the other two angels you popped back on earth, we're all at least 95% recycled material. Very Green. Eco friendly. Lot of souls go into one Grace, and you didn't content yourself with staying in your weight class, you had to go for _me_ too. Voila. Last of the archangels, and I am chock full of converted soul and a generous heaping of your Grace. Outside of that? Beats me. Few hundred new monsters on the earth, fresh from Purgatory?"

"Send me back." It's an answer to the question, a suggestion rather than a demand, and Gabriel reaches into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out a Hershey bar and unwrapping it delicately before taking a decidedly indelicate bite from it.

"Man, you just do not beat around the bush, do you, Castiel?"

* * *

 

"You're _not_ checking out on me, Cas. You hear me?" The books hit the table in a pile, and Dean addresses the still form on the bed, fixing him with a glare that he cannot reciprocate, and an inherent threat that he does not register. Shuffling through his supplies, Dean's hand hesitates, and he moves past all the mixings he'd need for a Crossroads deal. One potential avenue closed. He will not deliver Cas to Crowley, and he might as well gift wrap him, chosing that option.

The spell. The spell Castiel used to talk to him in his Heaven, to direct him how to escape. If he can find out which direction he went. . .

"You don't get to just pack it in, and I'm not leaving you to those bastards, _whichever_ ones got their hands on you."

"Technically, _he_ got his hands on _you_. It's all very touching. You get the double entendre there? Puns? Huh? No? Heathen. I get no respect."

Gabriel grins as he stares down the barrel of the gun instinctively and unwaveringly aimed between his eyes, and takes another bite of his chocolate bar, waving in greeting at Dean. "Hiya, Toots."

* * *

 

Castiel's voice is grave, and his expression earnest. "I unleashed that on them. Any deaths from those creatures. . ."

"You mean, like if either of the Winchesters bite it dealing with them? I mean, they _will_ probably be the ones stuck cleaning up the mess." Gabriel watches Castiel, and as he takes a bite of chocolate on Earth he does so in Heaven as well. And people think _they_ are multitaskers. They oughta try being him sometime, see if _they_ can function on multiple planes of existence at once. It’s all in the illusion.

Castiel's silence answers him.

"I mean, that's what this is all about, isn't it?" He points at the memory of Dean with his chin, jaw working as he chews on the candy, speaking around it. "Him."

* * *

 

"You know, I'm not entirely sure I approve of my little bro here's taste in men. You're a rude pain in the ass, aren't you?" Gabriel asks Dean as he comfortably settles himself on the edge of the bed next to Castiel's limp body, foot bobbing in the ADHD jiggle of someone unable to sit still as he rests his ankle atop his other knee, for all the world as if Castiel isn't even there.

Dean thumbs back the hammer on his gun, pain and desperation in his eyes.

"Bring him back."

Gabriel's eyebrows come together, rising into an incredulous point, and he can't help the laugh. "Seriously? We're not past this yet? Didn't we play this game before? You seriously think a _gun_ , which can't hurt me and you know it, and a _command's_ going to make this go your way?"

Dean draws the angelic blade, retrieved from Storm Lake, and sets it on the table between them as well, an unspoken threat, and he repeats himself with a bitter edge to the final word begging a miracle he cannot expect from this being whom he'd cajoled into making the stand that killed him.

"Bring him back, _please."_

Gabriel rolls his eyes.

* * *

 

"Yes." Castiel finally grates out, his eyes straying to the sleeping figure, and he knows from memory that right now, were he in his place there in the bed, Dean would be unconsciously tugging Castiel to his side, tangling them closer together. There's no way to hide this, no answer he can give that will negate the truth of what is _here_.

Gabriel has invited himself into Castiel's Heaven, and it makes him uncomfortable to know that he has been revealed. There are no denials here.

It's not sexual, his Heaven. It’s about _belonging._ About finding some measure of peace for himself and giving it in return to someone who needs it just as desperately.

"Everyone leaves him. I can't. Not yet."

* * *

 

"I am not going to lose him too." It's a promise, to Castiel, to Gabriel, and to himself. Dean will cut a deal. He will make his own miracle. He will do something, one way or another, to right this. Castiel did this for _him_. He knows the fear that drove Cas away from that power, knows he would never have accepted it if Dean hadn't gotten himself killed, again. If he hadn't dragged him to that lakeside.

"Yeah, yeah. I'm getting it in stereo, cupcake. You two are giving me a headache. I'm only going to say this once so listen up both of you." Resting his candy bar on his knee, Gabriel raises his hand, snapping his fingers, and the two realities resolve for him. He is sitting on one bed, in one place, having the one conversation, with the one conscious Dean, and the one conscious Castiel, and these two chuckleheads can shut up and listen to him.

Castiel's eyes snap open on the bed.

Dean freezes, a tremor running through his hands as he registers it.

Gabriel continues as if nothing has happened, all gestures and emphasis.

"Here's the deal. There _are_ no more deals. You stick me in this crappy ass job, you're stuck with what I say, and what I say is this is _it_. No more crying to Daddy or the Devil for a redo, and sure as hell no begging _me_ to pull your asses out of the fire. You live, you do your thing, you die, _the end_. You two fill in the details yourselves, because I'm done." Picking up his candy bar, Gabriel stands as Castiel sits up on the bed, dropping his feet to the floor and meeting Dean's shocked stare. Part way to the door, Gabriel jabs a finger into Dean's chest, barely drawing his attention. "Oh! And the same goes for your brother, too, you hear me? Less I see of the three of you the better, because I'm already cleaning up _one_ mess for you."

Oh, _now_ they're not talking. Gabriel shakes his head, torn between amusement and exasperation. He’s certain this won't be the last he sees of them, but hey. A man can dream. And at least they aren't boring.

If nothing else, the looks on their faces are worth a laugh. He winks, clicking his tongue against his teeth and flashes them a leer as he does.

"Don't worry. I'll see myself out. You two do. . . whatever it is that you two do between the staring and the spooning."

(Heaven is going to have to _learn_ to have a sense of humor.)

 

* * *

 

"Cancel the funeral plans, boys." With a whisper of wings, Gabriel has his arms thrown over the backs of both front chairs in the van, dangling his chocolate between his fingertips by Sam's ear as he leans forward from the back seat, chin level with their shoulders, looking up at the motel room he just left.

Sam flinches back in surprise, both hunters instinctively going for a defense. "Holy. . ."

"Yep, that's me." Gabriel confirms, smirking. "I am all about the holiness now. It's a pain in the ass. But like I was saying. Cancel the funeral plans. But if I were you. . .?"

Gabriel sits back in his seat, taking his last bite of candy. "I'd book a different hotel room."

He's gone before the candy wrapper has time to hit the floorboards.

* * *

 

It is not a fairytale ending. A fairytale ending, everything fades on a kiss and they live happily ever after. No complications. The Winchesters aren't built that way, and for all his experience Castiel knows that's not in his nature either. They’ve made too many enemies, collected too many nightmares and old scars, are all too stubborn and independent to coexist peacefully at all times, too inextricably tied together to pull apart, and they have left too many other loose ends.

But you expect loose ends. It's how you know you're not finished yet.

For now, it's the drive they have to look forward to: greasy-spoon diner food, watching each other's backs, stolen moments in crappy motels, running for their lives, saving people's lives, hunting things, being hunted. And they will do it together. Castiel knows how rare peace is, and he knows now that it'll be there at the end of the road.

He plans to put on as many miles as he can, before then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap on our season premiere! One chapter a day, written and published, from start to finish--it's been a heck of a ride! After considering it, I just wasn't able to let this story go-as I said in the first revision of these rambling author's notes, the beauty of Supernatural is that there's always something else just around the bend! For this verse (currently titled the "Before the Fall" 'Verse because I'm shockingly unimaginative for a writer) that means the Shippier Ending "Afterwards" and tag-along story "Incarceration" for my Destiel fans, because I love you and I promise I don't always have to torture the boys (just. . . y'know. Usually). Then we move on to more full-plot stories in this alternate Season 7 with Some Sin for Nothing, and on from there!
> 
> Thank you all for sticking with me, and for welcoming me so warmly into the fandom. This was my first Supernatural fic, and I was terrified it wouldn't pull together, or be well received. You lot are absolutely amazing for giving me a chance!
> 
> And for all of you who come here now that we're wrapped—please, let me know what you thought, and I hope you too enjoyed it!
> 
> (Even the ending. Though I agree, Chuck. Endings ARE hard.)
> 
> Love to you all.


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